tag:theconversation.com,2011:/institutions/university-of-the-witwatersrand-894/articlesThe University of the Witwatersrand2018-05-23T15:02:53Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/941392018-05-23T15:02:53Z2018-05-23T15:02:53ZWhy megaprojects to deliver houses in South Africa might not work<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218993/original/file-20180515-195308-tbl33i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GCRO/Clive Hassel</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2014, the South African government announced a new direction in housing <a href="http://www.infrastructurene.ws/2014/07/30/budget-vote-speech-by-minister-of-human-settlements/">policy</a>. The aim was to phase out smaller low cost housing projects of a few hundred units and focus exclusively on megaprojects – new settlements made of multitudes of housing units combined with a host of social amenities.</p>
<p>Given the uneven access to housing that resulted from apartheid, housing delivery has been a major focus of since 1994. Government’s 20 year <a href="http://www.nfvf.co.za/home/22/files/20YearReview.pdf">review</a> - 1994 to 2014 - reported that 3.7 million subsidised housing opportunities were created, undoubtedly a remarkable achievement.</p>
<p>Nevertheless in 2014 the then Minister of Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, became extremely <a href="http://www.infrastructurene.ws/2014/07/30/budget-vote-speech-by-minister-of-human-settlements/">concerned</a> that house production had been falling. And, a backlog of 2.3 million families remained. The Minister <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/human-settlements-mega-project-to-address-backlogs-1720469">favoured megaprojects</a> (also referred to as catalytic projects) as a way of getting delivery back on track. </p>
<p>Large human settlement projects weren’t entirely new to South Africa. Several were already at an advanced stage of construction in 2014. What was new in this announcement was the idea that all housing would be delivered exclusively through the construction of megaprojects across the country. From 2014 to 2017, the Department of Human Settlements developed a list of 48 catalytic projects which was <a href="http://thehda.co.za/newsletters/0417newsletter/index.html">finalised</a> last year.</p>
<p>In a recently published academic <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682116">paper</a> we argue that the policy was underdeveloped. The megaprojects approach moved swiftly from announcement, to discussion documents and frameworks, to the creation of lists of large scale projects. Most of this process occurred behind closed doors, with little consultation. And there has been little space to examine the limitations of the megaprojects approach – as well as the merits of alternatives, such as smaller urban infill projects. </p>
<p>Nevertheless the paper attempts to account for the uptake of the megaprojects idea within the human settlements sector, and understand the motivations and agendas of those who promoted it. </p>
<h2>Rationales for megaprojects</h2>
<p>In a broad sense megaprojects are glamorous because they are much more visible and impressive than diffuse small-scale projects. As a result, politicians can brand their delivery more effectively. Megaprojects convey a sense of decisive action in which the state can flex its muscle in big hit interventions.</p>
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<span class="caption">South Africa is focusing on new megaprojects to address its housing gap but it’s being urged to look within existing cities.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>More specifically, champions of the megaprojects approach believed that large scale projects could deliver more houses quicker. When announcing the policy in 2014, the then minister of human settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/human-settlements-mega-project-to-address-backlogs-1720469">stated</a> that megaprojects would help deliver 1.5 million units by 2019. </p>
<p>Some advocates of the megaprojects approach, notably the Gauteng provincial government, were particularly attracted to the idea of creating whole new <a href="https://www.fin24.com/Economy/Gauteng-launches-first-ever-post-apartheid-city-20150506">“post-apartheid cities”</a> which could meet the “live, work and play” needs internally. Starting afresh with new settlements would be a way of designing urban spaces to avoid the inequalities and inefficiencies that beset existing cities. They would also bring major projects to poor areas that had little else to drive any significant economic growth.</p>
<p>Megaprojects were also intended to solve a variety of governance problems. In particular, it was extremely difficult to manage the 11 000 human settlement projects that were at various stages across the country. Consolidating these into just a few dozen projects was a way of focusing government’s attention and reducing administrative burdens and costs. </p>
<p>The megaprojects approach also seemed to be a way of managing the division of work and some of the tensions between different spheres of government and various departments. With some local authorities having taken on more responsibility for housing projects, national and provincial government considered megaprojects to be a way of bringing housing under more centralised management.</p>
<h2>Concerns</h2>
<p>Some critics are less concerned about the scale of the projects than the fact that they could be <a href="http://www.econ3x3.org/sites/default/files/articles/Turok%202015%20Housing%20megaprojects%20FINAL_0.pdf">poorly located</a>. That’s largely because better located land is more expensive. In addition, there isn’t a great deal of well-located land that is large enough to accommodate new settlements of this scale.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682117">history of attempting to construct new towns</a> shows how difficult it is to create new urban centres with enough jobs for the people who live there. There is a fear that megaprojects will be no different and once the construction jobs run out, residents would have to bear the cost of travelling long distances to jobs outside the settlement. </p>
<p>Megaprojects on the urban periphery are also counter to the plans expressed in a wide variety of policy documents to <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682118/summary">curb urban sprawl and densify existing cities.</a> Peripheral locations also have other challenges. If new projects are located far from sewage, water, electricity and roads then these would have to be laid out great financial and environmental costs.</p>
<p>Other concerns have focused more directly on the huge scale of new projects. Big projects take many years to get off the ground, and so delivery can sometimes be suspended for a long time. </p>
<h2>Towards a balanced policy</h2>
<p>In a recent <a href="http://www.dhs.gov.za/sites/default/files/speeches/Budget%20Speech%2010%20May%2018_0.pdf">parliamentary address</a>, the new Minister of Human Settlements Noma-Indiya Mfeketo stated that catalytic projects “worth more than half a Trillion Rand” had been initiated. Yet she also announced that the budget had suffered a “massive cut” as a result of the fiscal challenges facing the state. </p>
<p>We believe that the moment should allow for some reflection on the now four year old megaprojects direction. This reflection should consider whether all housing should be delivered in megaprojects as originally intended by this policy, or whether a range of project sizes should be encouraged to facilitate, in particular, urban infill projects within existing urban areas. </p>
<p>Planned megaprojects should be evaluated with respect to their location, total cost to the state and long term sustainability. While some are reasonably accessible, others are peripheral, with marginal economic opportunities at best. South Africa cannot afford to construct housing in spaces that have few economic prospects and limited benefits for urban residents and the country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94139/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Ballard is affiliated with the Gauteng City-Region Observatory. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Margot Rubin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>South Africa needs to review its four years decision to exclusively deliver housing through megaprojects.Richard Ballard, Specialist Researcher: Gauteng City-Region Observatory, Wits University, University of the WitwatersrandMargot Rubin, Senior Researcher: NRF South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/968032018-05-20T10:39:05Z2018-05-20T10:39:05ZRamaphosa's new dawn: much better, but not nearly enough<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/219408/original/file-20180517-26300-oneznk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aaron Ufumeli/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://mg.co.za/tag/cyril-ramaphosa">Cyril Ramaphosa’s</a> rise to power has been greeted enthusiastically by most South Africans. Their hope is that the new president represents a leadership cohort within the governing African National Congress (ANC) that’s capable of reversing the toxic legacies of <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-17450447">Jacob Zuma’s</a> presidency. </p>
<p>Under Ramaphosa, the government is proving forceful in beginning to dismantle Zuma’s patronage networks in both party and state, determined in battling corruption. The new administration is also offering hope that South Africa can pursue a more viable economic trajectory. </p>
<p>Yet the Ramaphosa moment is far from being a new beginning.</p>
<p>First, much of the momentum behind Ramaphosa’s assault on corruption comes from fear in party ranks that the ANC is facing the very real prospect of losing its majority at 2019’s general election. The loss of control over three major metros in the <a href="https://www.elections.org.za/lgedashboard2016/leaderboard.aspx">2016 local government elections</a> came as a great shock to many in the party. The ANC had become complacent about maintaining itself in power. </p>
<p>This was despite extensive evidence – accumulated over five democratic general elections – that the ANC’s electoral dominance was being eroded by a mix of enlivened opposition. It came in the form of a more racially diverse <a href="https://www.da.org.za/">Democratic Alliance</a> (DA) and the Africanist populism of the <a href="https://www.effonline.org/">Economic Freedom Fighters</a> (EFF). </p>
<p>From this perspective, ANC “renewal” – the suggestion that the party is capable of overcoming its flaws and restoring its liberation credentials – is necessary for both self-belief and public persuasion. There should be no doubt that there is significant support for the project within the party. But it could well flounder.</p>
<p>If much of the momentum behind ANC “renewal” is situational rather than driven by conviction, then a reformist ANC leadership under Ramaphosa is going to confront major obstacles in the path ahead. </p>
<h2>Return to the ANC’s old elites</h2>
<p>Academic and political analyst Jonny Steinberg has <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2018-05-11-jonny-steinberg-sa-needs-many-presidents-with-backgrounds-like-zumas/">argued</a> that those who assumed state power in 1994 were the descendants of an African elite who, after white conquest, had attended mission schools. This elite had remained intact across generations. The majority of those who led the struggle for freedom were mission-educated, culminating in the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. </p>
<p>In contrast, Zuma was the son of a domestic worker too poor to send him to school. Such a man might have featured as a genuine revolutionary. Instead, Zuma betrayed the hopes of the poor and workers by, in the words of Steinberg, empowering “a bureaucratic bourgeoisie to steal one public utility at a time” while,</p>
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<p>spitting venom at the descendants of the old mission-educated elite, claiming they had used their generations of privilege to sew up a deal with white people. </p>
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<p>Steinberg’s analysis suggests that the Ramaphosa presidency signifies the return of state power to the hands of the ANC’s traditional elite. But a reformist president and ANC elite at the centre won’t be able to impose their will on those running either the country’s provinces or its state owned enterprises. As the examples of premier <a href="https://www.news24.com/Tags/People/supra_mahumapelo">Supra Mahumapelo</a> in North West province and commissioner <a href="http://ewn.co.za/Topic/Tom-Moyane">Tom Moyane</a> at the South African Revenue Service demonstrate, there will be strong resistance from within the ranks of the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie”. </p>
<p>Present indications are that Ramaphosa will prove able to assert his authority. And that he’s willing to face down political turbulence.</p>
<p>It’s likely that succession of high profile prosecutions are still to come. Even so, the state’s capacity to unravel ANC patronage networks is likely to prove limited. Pursuit of state capture kingpins at the major parastatals and in the provinces will prove hard. In any case, the enthusiasm of the ANC for having its dirty-linen washed in public is likely to diminish, especially if an election is nicely won. </p>
<p>On top of this it should not be overlooked that the newly dominant Ramaphosa faction may need – or want – to establish patronage networks of its own. It will need to make its own peace with the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, a class which is very much of the ANC’s own making since 1994.</p>
<h2>Changing the political economy</h2>
<p>ANC renewal and the war on corruption is one thing. But transforming the character of the South African economy is quite another. </p>
<p>One view is that the recovery of looted resources and a clampdown on future corruption will provide a more socially just and equitable government. And that it will lead to considerably high rates of growth and developmental welfare. </p>
<p>The thrust of the narrative is not untrue. But this wouldn’t, on its own, amount to a significant change in the economy’s overall trajectory. That’s because there’s little in the government’s economic policy that can seriously be construed as radical.</p>
<p>Much is made of the ANC’s commitment to <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/222155/ramaphosas-plan-for-radical-economic-transformation-and-tackling-unemployment/">“radical economic empowerment”</a>. In particular, the party’s decision to embrace a policy of expropriating land without compensation. Ramaphosa has taken the policy on board. But he’s stressed that land reform must go forward only as a result of extensive dialogue and without endangering food security. </p>
<p>Beyond such ambiguity, and vague commitments to rendering the economy more efficient and competitive, there’s little to suggest that Ramaphosa intends to take the economy in a new direction. There is, for instance, little about breaking up the cartels that dominate the economy. Or of tackling the economy’s historic reliance on the extraction of resources. </p>
<p>Nor is there any evidence – beyond Ramaphosa’s promise of a <a href="https://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/2017/11/14/ramaphosa-new-deal-for-sa/">new model</a> of public ownership – that an overhaul of the state economic enterprises such as the power utility Eskom and South African Airways is imminent. </p>
<p>And beyond rhetoric, there is little evidence of new thinking about how to tackle massive inequality or reduce the chronic level of unemployment. </p>
<p>These are early days, and the juggling short-term crises is, perhaps, inevitably taking priority over long-term thinking. But present indications are that the Ramaphosa presidency may prove to be little more than an attempt to purge Zuma-ism from an Mbeki-style neoliberal economy. </p>
<p>The future verdict may well be: much better, but far from enough.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96803/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Southall receives funding from the National Research Foundation </span></em></p>ANC renewal and the war on corruption is one thing. But transforming the character of the South African political economy is quite another.Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/963082018-05-14T14:46:34Z2018-05-14T14:46:34ZSouth Africa needs to box clever in its David versus Goliath duel with Trump<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218455/original/file-20180510-34006-1k8sui4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team meeting international investors and business leaders in London.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">GCIS/ Elmond Jiyane</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Recent actions by US President Donald Trump’s administration are severely straining relations with South Africa’s new government led by President Cyril Ramaphosa. And relations between the two governments are likely to worsen.</p>
<p>The first blow was last month’s threat by Trump’s UN Ambassador Nikki Haley that countries <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-04-30-us-threatens-to-cut-funding-to-south-africa">unwilling to tow the US line</a> would be punished. According to a list of the 2017 General Assembly vote counts released in March, South Africa was one of the 10 least supportive countries. It voted with the US <a href="https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/225048.pdf">only 18% of the time</a>. </p>
<p>More recently, Ramaphosa’s <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/press-statements/president-ramaphosa-expresses-concern-decision-us-government-withdraw-jcpoa-iran">expressed disappointment</a> at Trump’s withdrawal from Barack Obama’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/presidents-often-reverse-us-foreign-policy-how-trump-handles-setbacks-is-what-matters-most-now-95580?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Wednesday%20Test%203&amp;utm_content=Wednesday%20Test%203+CID_ba0406ae229f6e4f7aa8d532d878f39d&amp;utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&amp;utm_term=Presidents%20often%20reverse%20US%20foreign%20policy%20%20how%20Trump%20handles%20setbacks%20is%20what%20matters%20most%20now">nuclear deal with Iran</a> is likely to raise the US president’s ire, especially as South Africa presses ahead with plans to expand trade with Iran.</p>
<p>And relations between the two countries could sour further following South Africa’s decision <a href="https://city-press.news24.com/News/sa-recalls-ambassador-as-israeli-troops-kill-dozens-of-palestinians-20180515">to recall its ambassador to Israel</a> in protest against <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/reaction-gaza-protesters-us-embassy-israel-1.4662331">the killing</a> by the Israeli army of over 50 Palestinians protesting against the relocation of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The relocation came after Trump recognised the disputed holy city Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. </p>
<p>South Africa has a lot to lose. As the only liberal democracy on the State Department’s list of ten UN members most critical of US policies, it is also the only one that <a href="https://www.loc.gov/law/help/foreign-aid/southafrica.php">benefits substantially</a> from extensive trade and assistance agreements with the US.</p>
<p>Trump’s announcement that South Africa wouldn’t be given exemption from his recent unilateral hikes in tariffs on US <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-05-01-united-states-refuses-south-africa-import-exemption-over-national-security-fears">imports of steel and aluminium</a> has not yet been linked to its UN voting record. But commentators have raised this possibility.</p>
<p>Losing out on the exemption could cost South Africa <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/economy/2018-05-02-trump-duties-could-cost-sa-7500-jobs/">7,500 jobs</a>. The impact on the country’s economy could be far worse if Trump moves against South African manufactured products that currently enjoy special access to US markets under the African Growth and Opportunity Act <a href="https://za.usembassy.gov/business/trade-and-economic-relations/">(AGOA)</a>. In my view this threat may be exaggerated. And Trump’s targeting of South Africa would be rightly criticised as an attempt to undermine Ramaphosa’s efforts to reform and revitalise his nation’s troubled democracy and economy. </p>
<p>Given the size of the US economy relative to South Africa’s, many will view this as another case of David versus Goliath, with most rooting for David. South Africa’s challenge will be to exploit those conditions and facts that might disarm its more powerful adversary. Several are already evident.</p>
<h2>Disarming Trump</h2>
<p>First, the timing of the Trump administration’s actions are happening just as Ramaphosa’s commitment to <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-zumas-departure-20180216-story.html">redress corruption and misrule</a> under his predecessor Jacob Zuma is receiving international recognition and praise. </p>
<p>In addition, Ramaphosa is embellishing South Africa’s image in a year-long domestic and international campaign celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the iconic Nelson Mandela. He is pledging fresh and determined efforts to <a href="http://www.durban.gov.za/Resource_Centre/new2/Pages/Government-commemorates-centenary-celebrations-of-Nelson-Mandela-and-Albertina-Sisulu.aspx">uphold the Mandela legacy</a>.</p>
<p>In this spirit, Ramaphosa lobbied and received unanimous African support for South Africa’s bid for <a href="https://issafrica.org/iss-today/sa-returns-to-the-un-security-council-with-a-new-leader">another two-year term</a> on the UN Security Council. This is almost certain to be affirmed next month by the UN General Assembly in a vote that’s bound to raise South Africa’s standing internationally. </p>
<p>The following month former US president Barack Obama comes to Johannesburg to deliver the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/president-barack-obama-to-deliver-the-16th-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture">annual Mandela lecture</a>. The world will once again be reminded of Mandela’s values and ideals, as well as the contrasts between Trump’s character and that of his predecessor. </p>
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<span class="caption">US President Donald Trump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Michael Reynolds</span></span>
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<p>Second, it’s worth revisiting the State Department’s UN voting scorecard. The votes show that the mood of the General Assembly has become much more hostile since Trump became president. On the 92 issues that required UN General Assembly votes last year, the US was backed in only 31% of its resolutions – the lowest level of support since 2008.</p>
<p>This reflects the fact that Trump’s immediate predecessors tended to be pragmatic. Although for decades majorities in the General Assembly disagreed with the US on issues such as Palestinian rights, and the merits of US military adventures, there was nevertheless cooperation in other areas. </p>
<p>But Trump has long been dismissive of the UN and multi-lateralism in general as of little value or importance to the US. </p>
<p>Had South Africa voted with the US a few more times it would have joined the league of African states such as Kenya (20%), Ethiopia (21%) and Nigeria (22%). China (22%), Brazil (23%), and India (25%) aren’t much higher. </p>
<p>Third, the US claim that it was refusing to exempt South African from the steel and aluminium tariff hikes for “national security” reasons was laughable and might <a href="https://nyti.ms/2G*UGFo">not survive World Trade Organisation scrutiny</a>. South Africa supplies less than 2% of these commodities to the US. Yet the US saw fit to exempt nearly 60% of steel exports from the US’s European and <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/lighthizer-confirms-steel-tariff...">other allies</a>.</p>
<p>Fears that Trump may try to abrogate other South Africa preferences that allow imports of manufactured products, notably BMW Series 3 and Mercedes C Class automobiles, with a lot more jobs at stake, are understandable. South Africa should lobby a receptive US Congress to prevent this. Bi-partisan majorities recently renewed duty-free access until 2025, after protracted and <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2015/05/20/agoa-moves-forward-reviewing-last-weeks-reauthorization-in-the-u-s-senate/">successful negotiations</a> with South Africa.</p>
<p>South Africa can also draw on Congressional goodwill that so far has resisted Trump’s attempts to cut development assistance to Africa, including SA. </p>
<p>And finally, the business community has responded positively to Ramaphosa’s emissaries seeking support for his global campaign to raise <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-05-04-ingredients-to-realising-ramaphosas-audacious-100-bn-fdi-target/#.WvG8hIiFM2w">USD$100 billion of investments</a> for the country.</p>
<h2>Standing up to a bully</h2>
<p>There are many entrenched networks of cooperation between South Africa and the US among sister cities, provinces and states, civic organisations, educational and scientific exchanges, and various cultural and historical ties. They can all help to shield South Africa from Trump’s bullying.</p>
<p>Other countries, uncertain about how to respond to Trump, may not have the same means that South Africa has to connect directly and extensively with the American people. But, if Pretoria is willing to stand up to Trump, it might encourage African and other smaller countries to rethink simply trying to placate him as he persists in <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/why-foreign-leaders-have-to-keep-putting-up-with-trumps-abuse.html">demeaning and denigrating them</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96308/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John J Stremlau serves on the Board of the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA)
. </span></em></p>South Africa's relations with the US could sour under President Trump.John J Stremlau, 2017 Bradlow Fellow at SA Institute of International Affairs, Visiting Professor of International Relations, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/962312018-05-13T08:38:39Z2018-05-13T08:38:39ZCountries must compete for migrant workers to boost their economies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218070/original/file-20180508-34027-z7qbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Instead of keeping migrants out, countries should consider the economic benefits of letting them in.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Zoltan Major/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Politicians and the media expend inordinate amounts of energy debating migration, often using nativist, populist and xenophobic rhetoric. This is despite the fact that, as of 2017, only three out of every 100 people – a <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/international-migration-report-2017.html">mere 3.4%</a> of the world’s population – have left their home nations to migrate to a new country. </p>
<p>The message from people like US President Donald Trump and the UK’s “Brexiteers” is that migrants should be kept out at all costs to “save” their economies. Yet many scholars have argued that attracting and keeping migrants is <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-is-at-risk-of-losing-migrants-who-are-vital-to-the-health-of-our-economy-67455">essential to economic competitiveness</a> in a globalising world. Some countries are responding positively to such arguments, embracing the benefits migrants can offer to their economies. Others – African countries among them – are far behind the curve.</p>
<p>Many developing countries are immigrant-sending countries which can have some negative effects. In 2017, <a href="https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/international-migration-report-2017.html">74% of all immigrants</a> were of working age. It makes sense that losing this vital demographic can damage a country’s economy – and that gaining these workers can help grow another’s. This is borne out by history, too: in the 19th century, migrant-receiving countries like the US grew faster than migrant-sending countries like Italy and Ireland because these migrants added to their host country’s workforce and left their home countries with fewer workers.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-abstract/29/2%20(82)/261/31081/Frontier-Heritage-Migration-in-the-Global-Ethnic">my research</a> on migration I have found that countries like Vietnam, India and China are actively trying to recruit people from their diasporas – those living outside the region where they or their ancestors were born – to help build their economies.</p>
<p>My research focuses on frontier migration: the movement of people, technology, ideas and capital from a “developed” to a “developing” economy. Among them are increasing numbers of frontier return migrants who were born and raised in one country, leave it for some time but are now opting to return home. Researchers used to assume that once people migrated to the West, they and their children would stay there. But this is increasingly not the case. Another category I focus on are frontier heritage migrants; those raised in the diaspora who return to the land of their ethnic heritage. </p>
<p>Globalisation has spurred increasing numbers of all types of frontier migrants. One of the unexpected consequences is that developed countries might lose out as more and more frontier migrants set their sights on emerging market economies.</p>
<h2>The US is losing out</h2>
<p>The world’s most powerful country and its <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/worlds-biggest-economies-in-2017/">largest economy</a>, the US, was until recently known as a country of immigrants. </p>
<p>Since 2017, the Trump administration has championed a number of measures to keep immigrants and refugees out: building a wall on the country’s southern border with Mexico, limiting refugees and even deleting the phrase, “nation of immigrants” from <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/22/588097749/america-no-longer-a-nation-of-immigrants-uscis-says">an official mission statement</a>. But this shift didn’t begin with Trump: it started <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/ways-immigration-system-changed-911/story?id=17231590">in earnest</a> after the events of 11 September, 2001. </p>
<p>Migration and tech researcher Vivek Wadhwa <a href="http://issues.org/25-3/wadhwa-2/">has warned</a> for years that putting up barriers to immigration will reduce the US’s innovative, technological and economic edge. After all, many US businesses are started by immigrants, and just over half of the country’s one billion dollar startup companies had <a href="http://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Immigrants-and-Billion-Dollar-Startups.NFAP-Policy-Brief.March-2016.pdf">at least one immigrant founder</a>.</p>
<p>Wadwha’s <a href="https://www.cfr.org/content/thinktank/Wadhwa_Presentation.pdf">research</a> among STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) graduate students who came to the US to study for advanced degrees revealed alarming shifts. Before 2001, most of these sorts of graduates would remain in the US after completing their degrees. After 2001, hostile immigration policies “pushed” them to become frontier return migrants, going home to countries like India and China. </p>
<p>The US was forced to <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/05/10/number-of-foreign-college-students-staying-and-working-in-u-s-after-graduation-surges/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&amp;utm_campaign=e692facc96-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_10&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-e692facc96-400347641">change policy</a> to counter the trend towards STEM students’ return migration. </p>
<p>India and China, meanwhile, have also realised the value of attracting their own diasporas back home, and drawing talent from elsewhere in the world. They’ve developed several <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article/29/2%20(82)/261/31081/Frontier-Heritage-Migration-in-the-Global-Ethnic">new policies</a> to make this easier.</p>
<p>For example, China recently changed its <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201801/23/WS5a668664a3106e7dcc135dfb.html">visa policy</a> so that “overseas Chinese” can have multiple-entry visas valid for five years instead of just one. <a href="http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---asia/---ro-bangkok/---ilo-beijing/documents/publication/wcms_565474.pdf">A number of other initiatives</a> have also been introduced to entice skilled migrants to China.</p>
<p><a href="http://time.com/5107485/baidus-robin-li-helping-china-win-21st-century/">Robin Li</a>, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the internet company Baidu – often referred to as China’s Google – is one of those who’ve pointed out that the US’s loss could be his country’s gain, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2017/04/28/talk-asia-robin-li-block-a.cnn">saying</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>this is a good time that China stand up and say, ‘Hey, come to us, we welcome immigrants…’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>China and the US are in a battle over which nation will dominate the 21st-century technologically and immigration is at the heart of this battle. </p>
<p>However, it is not only technology migrants who add value to an economy. Workers with all different skill sets are necessary. For example, US agriculture <a href="http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/">largely relies</a> on foreign workers and Japan, a highly industrialised country with an ageing population, will need to bring in more and more young foreign workers <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/31/national/japans-need-foreign-labor-get-dire-2050-nears/">to survive</a>.</p>
<h2>Policy benefits for Africa?</h2>
<p>African countries are not seizing the opportunity presented by the migration-economic nexus. </p>
<p>Only a handful of African countries – among them <a href="https://www.liberianobserver.com/news/we-must-integrate-the-diaspora-in-our-policies-on-migration/">Liberia</a> and <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-17/west-shuts-out-migrants-ethiopias-doors-are-open-even-its-enemy">Ethiopia</a> – have actively worked to bring in more migrants. </p>
<p>I have found that people in general and people of African descent in particular, both in Africa and the West, are particularly interested in moving to South Africa to work. This is because South Africa has a well-developed infrastructure and offers what many migrants refer to as “lifestyle” – a good quality of life. </p>
<p>South Africa is trying to position itself as the gateway to the African continent and needs a strong economy to do so. The country would therefore benefit tremendously from a more migrant-welcoming policy. </p>
<p>Building a robust economy has always required migrant workers of all types. That’s not going to change any time soon. The country with the most open immigration policy will be best positioned to succeed in the global economy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96231/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Melissa Tandiwe Myambo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many scholars argue that attracting migrants is essential to economic competitiveness in a globalising world.Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/961862018-05-09T14:10:28Z2018-05-09T14:10:28ZLittering in South Africa is the expression of wider selfish – and costly -- culture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217938/original/file-20180507-46332-ozxh3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dumped waste is a constant eyesore on the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa&#39;s economic hub. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">African News Agency Archives (ANA)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is common when municipal workers go on strike in South Africa to resort to upturning garbage cans and <a href="https://www.google.co.za/search?q=strikers+trash+streets&amp;rlz=1C1NHXL_enZA711ZA711&amp;tbm=isch&amp;source=iu&amp;ictx=1&amp;fir=mO-oCzCRotWjoM%253A%252CrZzuB2cX5nzD8M%252C_&amp;usg=__A5B5Gilb7HvdtziRxRF5VRGcrZQ%3D&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiEicvlkfPaAhWJCMAKHdQyBLkQ9QEILjAD#imgrc=tTkozv_oDABvHM:">strewing litter</a> around city centres. Their message is clear: we may be at the bottom of the social heap, and you may think we are human trash, but by God, society needs us, and if you don’t listen to us and give us a living wage, we’ll make you pay for it. </p>
<p>Trashing a city is more than a demand for a better wage. Often, it’s also an expression of rage against employer arrogance or unaccountability, and a demand for basic respect. Such tactics are manifestly expressions of class struggle and class power, workers resorting to their most effective weapon. While they are unlikely, in extremis, to be able to confront the armed might of the state, they may well be able to make city managers and the general population wilt in the face of the stink and mess of uncollected garbage. </p>
<p>Yet such actions are indicative of a discordant society, and a culture of littering can tell us a lot about a society’s ethos.</p>
<p>Littering is an act of individual or group disposal of waste at the public expense in terms, not only of the cost of public collection, but also at worst, of public health, and always in terms of public enjoyment of the environment. It prioritises the private interest over the public, and places the burden of collection or consequences of litter on the collective. </p>
<p>Doubtless too, it is expressive of class, income, status and power. It is no accident that in most – if not all countries – better-off residential areas are likely to be freer of litter than worse off localities. They have more public clout and more private resources.</p>
<p>Littering tells us a great deal about community spirit. It is surely no accident that the Scandinavian countries, which regularly top the <a href="http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2018/">World Happiness Index</a>, are relatively <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/237c63d4-0a54-406a-ae51-ad677a872456">litter free</a>. Their governments have long prioritised the collective interest and there is less social inequality than in similarly industrialised nations. </p>
<p>Industrialised countries such as Britain and the US are rich, but they’ve embraced austerity and encouraged rampant consumerism, making them sadly notorious for being far more publicly dirty, as captured by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/apr/06/socialsciences.highereducation">Kenneth Galbraith’s</a> (1958) critique of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/6/8/8742803/private-affluence-public-squalor">“Private Affluence and Public Squalor”</a>. South Africa has similarly developed a culture of externalising private costs onto the public, a culture of not caring about the environment which has been emblematic of the country’s mining industry for more than a century.</p>
<h2>Public interest</h2>
<p>South Africa is a country still deeply divided along lines of race, class, and geography in which there may be a public, but a limited sense of “public interest”. It’s a country where the needs of the better off were historically always prioritised over those of the poor.</p>
<p>For example, the expansion of the road system was accompanied by the massive expansion of white suburbia from the 1960s, where tellingly, pedestrians – many of them black domestic workers going to and from work – were denied pavements and left to walk in the road. Because the white inhabitants of suburbia were ratepayers, and because they employed domestic labour to tend to their verges, they enjoyed a generally litter free environment. The scholarship is not available to tell us about the state of litter and waste in the townships at that time, but we may guess it was distressingly different.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217939/original/file-20180507-46353-ju336c.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba, second from left, joins the city’s Are Sebetseng (Let’s work) cleaning campaign.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Enoch Lehung</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today, the South African environment is pockmarked by the detritus of mass consumption. The culture of takeaway culture is also the culture of throwaway, and if there is no litter bin available, or if it’s full, too bad. It’s just easier to dump. So, what if it adds to the mess? Does anyone really care about the one more bottle or can lying on the ground?</p>
<p>There are worries, as there should be, that the appalling littering along South Africa’s highways and the litter to be found even in many of South Africa’s beauty spots, is a threat to our tourist industry, and that in turn, means fewer jobs (let alone less general enjoyment). Yet the problems resulting from poor disposal of waste run far deeper. </p>
<p>Yes, the fast food industry and the supermarket chains, which have a fetish for unnecessary packaging, have much to answer for. But the externalisation of production costs onto to the public is hard-wired into South African industry. </p>
<p>South Africa is a country whose industrial origins lie in mining, and mining systematically produces massive waste and pollution which often has hugely detrimental effects on the environment <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-mine-dumps-in-south-africa-affect-the-health-of-communities-living-nearby-77113">and public health</a>. This culture continues today, sadly encouraged by lax governmental environmental supervision and excessive concern for profits, investment and private gain. </p>
<p>“Littering” by individuals is merely the expression of a far wider selfish – and publicly, costly - culture.</p>
<h2>Addressing the issue</h2>
<p>There are no great mysteries about how to address the issue of litter. What is needed first is the political will. This in turn requires the recognition of the importance of the problem. </p>
<p>There is more at stake than what many people might consider to be merely a middle class distaste for littering and general physical untidiness. Indeed, any presumption that middle class people have a greater dislike of litter than working class people or the poor needs itself to be questioned. After all, poor people bear the brunt of the problem. Where there is litter, there is filth, and where there is filth, there is disease.</p>
<p>Political will must be backed up by public resources, and all the paraphernalia of waste collection – from collection lorries, appropriate waste sites and disposal mechanisms, and litter bins. So much is obvious. Yet what is also required is far greater effort by government and ordinary citizens to curb the waste encouraged by excess packaging. </p>
<p>South Africa’s recycling industries – providers of thousands of jobs in the informal sector – need to be backed up by greater requirements imposed on retailers to provide collection points for plastic, cans, bottles and so on. The lack of effort by municipalities to encourage recycling by requiring householders to sort their waste into categories is scandalous, especially in middle class, high consumption areas where this would be easy to implement. </p>
<p>Legislation to curb use of plastic is spreading <a href="http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/eu-commission-adopts-plastics-recycling-policy/">around the world</a>, and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229533184_The_economics_of_plastic_bag_legislation_in_South_Africa">South Africa </a>should not want to be left behind.</p>
<p>A cleaner environment, cleaner air, cleaner towns and cities, needs to be placed firmly on the public agenda.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96186/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Southall receives funding from the National Research Foundation. </span></em></p>Littering in protest is indicative of a discordant society, and a culture of littering can tell us a lot about a society's ethos.Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/950112018-05-07T14:15:12Z2018-05-07T14:15:12ZHow South Africa should tackle the redistribution of land in urban areas<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217518/original/file-20180503-83693-jhzaak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South Africa&#39;s property regime is anchored in registered title and this can be rigid and exclusionary.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Kim Ludbrook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Land debates are reverberating across South Africa after the country’s parliament <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-land-exproriation/vote-in-south-africas-parliament-moves-land-reform-closer-idUSKCN1GB22I">resolved to accelerate land redistribution</a> through expropriation without compensation where necessary. Twenty four years since the advent of democracy, land remains a stark and visible symbol of dispossession and racial and income inequality.</p>
<p>The current wave of land reform debates is different in one key respect: there’s been an emergence of an urban angle to them. And rightly so. The majority of South Africans live in urban areas. On top of this spatial apartheid lives on in South Africa’s cities. </p>
<p>But genuine land reform requires a shift in the country’s approach to urban land: it can’t be seen simply in terms of its market value and its potential for profit. Land’s social and redress value must be considered. </p>
<p>There’s also the real possibility of the land debate being hijacked for political party or elite gains rather than a genuinely re-distributive agenda for poor and working class people. South Africans need to pay attention to the voices dominating land debates, and constantly ask: land reform for whom? </p>
<p>In spite of the challenges, the current moment could provide a golden opportunity to redefine the country’s approach to urban land. I spoke to Lauren Royston, who has been working on the urban land question in the research and advocacy arena for more than a quarter of a century. She recently <a href="http://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&amp;method=view_books&amp;global%5Bfields%5D%5B_id%5D=517">co-authored</a> “Untitled: Securing Land Tenure in Urban and Rural South Africa”. </p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Sarita Pillay:</strong> Are we seeing a conversation about urban land reform that we’ve not had before? </p>
<p><strong>Lauren Royston:</strong> I think we’re seeing an opening for a conversation about urban land reform in a way that hasn’t been present before. Urban land tends to be hidden in other urban development sectors such as housing, planning and municipal finance. </p>
<p>The expropriation without compensation debate might be changing that, creating an urban land focus and redistribution an urban land issue too. But a meaningful shift in the debate requires serious interrogation of key areas such as the dynamics of the property market as well as a review of how both state owned and private land can be used to accommodate urban land reform.</p>
<p><strong>Sarita Pillay:</strong> Urban land in South Africa’s cities isn’t approached as an opportunity for redistribution or social justice. Good public land in cities is being sold for profit by government while land in well-located suburbs is not considered for public housing. Would you agree that the country’s provinces and city municipalities haven’t pursued brave and progressive approaches to urban land?</p>
<p><strong>Lauren Royston:</strong> I do think that state land is often seen as a revenue generator. I’m not unsympathetic to that – municipalities do have big mandates and are under-funded. But isn’t it time to rethink private land? The expropriation debate gives us that opportunity. </p>
<p>It seems to me that occupied inner city buildings and occupied private land parcels are a prime case for a focused, programmatic expropriation approach. One that needn’t cause instability. What we need to talk
about next is how those buildings will be held. It’s my view that they should be a public or social asset, not privately owned. The country should have a debate about this.</p>
<p><strong>Sarita Pillay:</strong> Expropriation can also be used by government to ensure shack settlements on private land finally have access to basic services and infrastructure. This was raised as a demand in the recent <em>Land for Living</em> <a href="https://www.groundup.org.za/article/cape-town-residents-call-land-decent-housing/">march in Cape Town</a>. Is this the kind of genuine urban land reform that the expropriation debate opens up?</p>
<p><strong>Lauren Royston:</strong> Definitely. But the risk with expropriation is how political it has become. Despite the heated debate, it’s always been technically possible. In the urban context, the Housing Act allows for expropriation. The call for an amendment to the constitution seems premature – at least until existing provisions have been used more proactively. </p>
<p>Expropriation in the urban setting should focus on poor households – those earning a household income below R3 200 per month. They make up <a href="http://www.seri-sa.org/images/Minding_the_Gap.pdf">close to 50%</a> of Johannesburg’s population. Private sector delivery doesn’t work for them. </p>
<p><strong>Sarita Pillay:</strong> There seems to be a lack of public imagination and interrogation around how land is held and the ownership of land when it comes to urban land reform. You’ve written about land tenure, how should we be thinking about this in an urban context?</p>
<p><strong>Lauren Royston:</strong> South Africa’s property regime is anchored in registered title and this can be rigid and exclusionary. To get into official or formal property if you’re poor, you have to enter a system of individual title deed registration via a housing subsidy project. But a significant number of subsidy properties are not on the deeds registry. </p>
<p>South Africa needs to consider that the problem with title may be more systematic than simply “fixing” a <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/storage/app/media/Pages/2017/october/High_Level_Panel/Commissioned_Report_land/Commissioned_Report_on_Spatial_Inequality.pdf">backlog</a>. It needs to look into the range of tenures that exist outside the formal property system. These tenures have legal protection under a range of different post-1994 tenure laws but these rights are not registered which makes them less secure and denies access to the many benefits of registered title. </p>
<p><strong>Sarita Pillay:</strong> What do you think needs to happen now?</p>
<p><strong>Lauren Royston:</strong> If President Cyril Ramaphosa’s commitments are genuine, then after the 2019 elections the government needs to move beyond rhetoric and it needs to start countering the fear mongering and instability spectre. And it needs to improve capacity on land by co-opting private sector and civil society experts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95011/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarita Pillay receives funding from NRF &amp; South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning for her PhD Studies. She is an active supporter of Reclaim The City. </span></em></p>The current debate about land reform in South Africa could open the door to reviewing urban land ownership issues.Sarita Pillay, PhD Student at South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/957182018-04-28T07:34:31Z2018-04-28T07:34:31ZLessons about history by twitter: two South Africans go head-to-head on slavery<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216649/original/file-20180427-175054-1owrag3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>A recent <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/tshisa-live/tshisa-live/2018-04-23-sizwe-dhlomo-gives-helen-zille-a-piece-of-his-mind-about-colonialism/">exchange on Twitter</a> between South African TV personality Sizwe Dhlomo and Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, is worthy of close examination because it raises important questions about how history is viewed, how debates unfold on social media and how South Africans deal with racism and diversity. </p>
<p>Initially, Dhlomo basically baited Zille by redirecting a tweet by the <a href="http://www.thekingcenter.org/">King Centre</a> – an advocacy group set up in memory of <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-bio.html">Martin Luther King</a> – which issued a blunt proclamation that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was nothing righteous, just or positive about the Transatlantic slave trade or slavery in America. Nothing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Zille replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I agree, there was absolutely nothing positive about slavery or the slave trade. If you read the transformed (South African) history textbook… you will see the acknowledgement that despite its many evils, colonialism helped end slavery in parts of Africa.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dhlomo then responded:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You, like it or not, are a beneficiary of colonialism, albeit indirectly. Your biases, whether you’re aware of them or not, make it unlikely for you to be able to accurately weigh up the negatives of colonialism versus the positives you speak of.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After asserting that the motive of colonialism was never to ultimately benefit the colonised (an assertion with which Zille agreed), he rounded off by posing the question whether or not there might have been alternative historical alternatives to colonialism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Without colonialism, were the colonised nations doing well? Would they have continued to do so and develop at their own pace?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>before providing his own answer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I see no reason why the answer would be no. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Four points can usefully be made about all this. The first is about the limitations, and dangers, of engaging in serious debates on Twitter; the second is that reducing history to simple matters of right or wrong is fraught with risk; thirdly, the need to recognise that history can be contradictory; and finally that history, is and always has been, contested.</p>
<h2>The inappropriateness of Twitter</h2>
<p>Twitter is inappropriate for complex historical debates. There is just too much to be said in defence of any position – whether conservative, liberal or radical – for it to be reduced to exchanges of 280 characters or less. The process of assessing the motivations, dynamics and impacts of colonialism by scholars is both constant and continuous, and reducing historians’ debates to trite summaries is dangerous. </p>
<p>This is not to say that the history should be the property of only the historians, and that ordinary people should keep out. History is, after all, actually as much about the present as the past. But we should beware of the misuse of history for political point-scoring. </p>
<p>Yet if Dhlomo may be considered as guilty of this, Zille has only herself to blame for setting herself up as a target by her initial <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-helen-zilles-folly-and-the-simplicities-of-debate-75233">ill-advised tweet</a> on colonialism sent more than a year ago while she was in Singapore.</p>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Just as Twitter can’t encompass the complexity of historical debate, reducing history to matters of simply right or wrong, or good or bad, is similarly fraught with risks. This was <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/1066-All-That-W-Sellar/dp/0413772705">gloriously and famously illustrated by</a> <em>1066 and All That</em>, by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, published as long ago as 1930, which reduced English history to a hilarious parody of good and bad kings and queens. </p>
<p>The fundamental point is: history is almost always contradictory, moving in different directions at the same time.</p>
<p>It would seem that this is the major point that Zille wants to make in her various tweets and more extended comments about colonialism. She will claim that she is not defending colonialism, and the racism inherent in it, but pointing out that, like God, it moves in a mysterious way. </p>
<p>In her defence, we might reference debates about the origins of the “developmental state” in Southern Africa. Broadly, a number of radical scholars (by that I mean not conservative ones) have explored how settler colonialism fostered capitalism development. <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/521003/pdf">Examples include</a> Bill Freund’s “SA Developmental State of the 1940s”.</p>
<p>In South Africa, for example, the launch of parastatals – such as the power utility Eskom in the 1920s – fostered rapid growth and the creation of an Afrikaner bourgeoisie. In Marxian terminology, state policies helped develop the forces of production – but only for the benefit of white people in general, and Afrikaners in particular.</p>
<p>Would South Africa have industrialised as fast, or in a more beneficial way, without such a white-driven developmental state – as Dhlomo implies? Frankly, we don’t know. Nonetheless, we must allow that counter-factual history, the exploring of possible alternative historical paths that might have been followed if A and B had not happened, is a legitimate line of enquiry. Yet it can never be a substitute for exploring what did happen.</p>
<h2>History is always contested</h2>
<p>While Zille should not be pilloried for indicating that history is contradictory, she needs to be far less slapdash in lauding what she perceives as the benefits of colonialism. Her exchange with Dhlomo on slavery offers a prime example. </p>
<p>Let’s not be so politically correct that we have to deny the fundamental truth of Zille’s proposition that the colonial intervention involved the attempted abolition as well as the promotion of slavery. However, the problem is not what she says but what she does <em>not</em> say. We need to ask, for instance, why and how the British chose to bring slavery to an end. </p>
<p>The “why” must necessarily refer to the heroic labours of the anti-slavery movement of the day. But it also needs to be pointed out that abolition featured slave-owners being compensated by the state, whereas the slaves themselves received nothing. </p>
<p>In addition, much of the compensation was redirected into investment in the then rapidly expanding railway system in Britain, thereby providing a direct boost to the development of capitalism and colonialism. </p>
<p>We might also want to remember that when the American Civil War broke out, Britain initially supported the South, as it wanted to avoid the disruption of slave-produced cotton to its textile mills in northern England.</p>
<p>In short, it’s all so much more complicated than any attempt to produce a historical balance sheet in which the good of colonialism may outweigh, or at least compensate for, some of its negative impacts. Historians of whatever stripe, and certainly not politicians, cannot be allowed to omit inconvenient facts.</p>
<p>Yet while Dhlomo may be granted as much space as he likes to explore and condemn the brutalities of slavery and colonialism, he cannot be allowed to argue, as he did, that Zille’s historical judgement is inherently flawed by the inherent biases which flow from her being “a beneficiary of colonialism, albeit indirectly”.</p>
<p>This is dangerous nonsense. For a start, it assumes there is such a thing as “correct” history. There is not. History is always contested. </p>
<p>More saliently, Dhlomo’s assertion is absurdly deterministic, implying that social background (in today’s South Africa, read “race”) dictates the capacity to “understand” history. This is rubbish. True, it is very likely that the social experiences of being black will provide some major comprehension of colonialism. But it does not follow that being white necessarily blocks such understanding. </p>
<p>If it did, then Marx’s thoughts on colonialism should themselves be deleted from the black reading list.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95718/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Southall receives funding from the NRF. </span></em></p>A furious Twitter row between a TV personality and South African politician about slavery sheds light on the failings of arguments in 280 characters.Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/956662018-04-26T14:21:24Z2018-04-26T14:21:24ZSouth Africa's freedom journey shows 1994 was merely a starting point<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216527/original/file-20180426-175077-1jnckp1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Workers affiliated to the The South African Federation of Trade Unions protest against the proposed minimum wage. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Nic Bothma</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Twenty-four years into South Africa’s <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/south-african-general-elections-1994">‘miracle’ democracy</a>, it is clear that the historic <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/723604?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">1994 election</a> and the constitutional settlements of <a href="https://www.acts.co.za/constitution-of-the-republic-of-south-africa-act-1996/constitution_of_the_republic">1993 and 1996 </a> were mere starting points. These revered historical moments set guiding principles and benchmarks, but they were neither the solution nor the final destination. South Africa’s democracy is an ongoing struggle.</p>
<p>As the country celebrates <a href="http://www.bloemfonteincourant.co.za/fs-to-host-2018-freedom-day-celebrations/">Freedom Day 2018</a>, continuous contests for freedom and justice unfold around <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/rdm/news/2017-09-27-anti-corruption-marches-across-sa-target-guptas--as-cosatu-strikes/">governance</a> and leadership, <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-04-25-the-start-of-strike-season-what-to-expect">economic justice</a> as well as <a href="https://www.enca.com/south-africa/government-must-make-our-language-official-chief-khoisan-sa">reconciliation and inclusion</a>. The struggles are intense, often tumultuous, even disconcerting. Yet they are also anchored in the frameworks and promises of the 1994 beginning. </p>
<p>It makes South African politics the place for those with robust hearts, stamina and an appetite for ongoing change.</p>
<h2>Deferred revolution</h2>
<p>South Africans generally, and scholars in particular, have had few illusions that the struggle was destined to be ongoing. At moments in the negotiation process, many lamented the compromises of the <a href="https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv03275/05lv03294/06lv03298.htm">constitutional negotiations</a>. The subsequent low-intensity transformation was also criticised. Talk was of a <a href="https://search.proquest.com/openview/80a405820c2bc512da00a5ae84143583/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&amp;cbl=48673">suspended and deferred revolution</a>.</p>
<p>A mere six years ago, even the governing African National Congress (ANC) was embroiled in a debate about what it called a ‘second transition’ or <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/docs/discus/2012/transition.pdf">‘second phase of the transition’</a>. And, recent events such as the death of Winnie Madikizela Mandela (hailed as radical icon that had been <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-04-06-00-how-the-anc-betrayed-winnie">betrayed by the ANC</a>), and the anti-minimum-wage strike by the South African Federation of Trade Unions <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/zapiro/?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Zapiro%20Thing%2026%20April%202018%20Wine%20Wizard%2062&amp;utm_content=Zapiro%20Thing%2026%20April%202018%20Wine%20Wizard%2062+CID_46bb9287ff23f90d11a98ae0471adf92&amp;utm_source=TouchBasePro#.WuGUwWdfB2A%20%22%22">(Saftu)</a> showed the extent of the restlessness around the demands for more meaningful socio-economic change – and further transitions. </p>
<p>These events link into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s era with its promise of a <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-02-22-the-ramaphosa-spring-from-contradictions-to-lines-in-the-sand/#.WuHIdi5ubIU">new transition</a>, away from a captured and compromised political order.</p>
<p>But the major flaws of the original settlement stand out when one considers in some detail the areas of ongoing contest. These include governance, economic justice as well as reconciliation and inclusion. </p>
<h2>What 1994 promised, but didn’t deliver</h2>
<p>South Africa is the <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/?cat=22">most unequal country in the world</a>. The Constitutional Court has, mostly for practical purposes, given up trying to enforce the socio-economic, second generation rights that came with the <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/constitution/SAConstitution-web-eng.pdf">Constitution</a> and were endorsed through the wondrous 1994 election.</p>
<p>The architects of the Constitution erred in assuming there would be systematic and definitive improvement in socio-economic transformation following the end of apartheid and the dawn of democracy. It has since become accepted that socio-economic delivery will be commensurate with what <a href="http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2000/19.html">government can afford</a>. The state’s ability to deliver is severely hampered by <a href="https://www.sjc.org.za/if_we_allow_state_capture_the_fight_against_inequality_will_be_lost">state capture and corruption</a>.</p>
<p>Freedom in 1994 brought the promise of good leadership and accountable, responsible government. Yet, neither elections nor the <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329295023003002?journalCode=pasa">constitutional negotiations</a> could guarantee that politicians would not abuse the constitution and government office for their own gain. There were no instruments to prevent the rapid spread and entrenchment of this plague. </p>
<p>Nor have elections provided the panacea they were expected to deliver. South Africans love their elections, and they lap up party political propaganda and promises, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?ei=L-bgWrTPI4aXgAbsg7-ICA&amp;q=dominance+and+decline+the+anc+in+the+time+of+zuma&amp;oq=DOMINANCE+AND+DECLINE&amp;gs_l=psy-ab.1.0.0l3j0i30k1l3j0i8i30k1">election after election</a>. </p>
<p>But regular elections haven’t yet ensured that South Africa becomes a multiparty democracy in which the possibility of losing power would ensure responsible governance. </p>
<h2>South Africans have had to fight for their rights</h2>
<p>One of the most endearing, or exasperating, things about South Africa is that citizens want to keep on believing in the 1994 dream, come hell or high water, come disdain and corruption, by the leaders that had been put into place, mostly by the ANC. The result is that change often depends on those exact, compromised internal party-movement processes that are beyond the ambit of constitutional provisions.</p>
<p>When South Africans voted in 1994, few had imagined that the fight 20 years on would be to drag the state away from captors acting in cahoots with the <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/329757135/State-Capture-Report-2016#from_embed">first citizen and his followers</a> and place it back into the hands of the citizens. </p>
<p>Clearly, the constitutional order was designed on the assumption of a multi-party rotational system, and not a dominant party order.</p>
<p>At the moment of freedom in 1994, South Africans could not have imagined that they would have to take to the streets to get action (and sometimes legislation) on crucial policy issues. Cases where the constitutionally established processes have just not been enough include <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03056244.2017.1288615?scroll=top&amp;needAccess=true&amp;journalCode=crea20">land transformation</a>, housing and post-secondary education.</p>
<p>People have also been forced to protest simply to get provincial and municipal governments to do their work. And, mass mobilisation by civil society and political parties was needed to help the ANC <a href="https://journals.co.za/content/journal/10520/EJC-c70c6d816">get rid</a> of its own president, and his proxies. Citizen activism has taken the constitutional benchmarks and moved South Africa beyond the established order.</p>
<h2>Reconciliation and inclusion</h2>
<p>Little was it imagined that the reconciliation that was forged around the 1994 election and the <a href="http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/">Truth and Reconciliation Commission </a> would become so fragile towards the 25 years of freedom, such that court convictions for <a href="https://theconversation.com/jail-time-for-south-african-woman-using-racist-slur-sets-new-precedent-94179">racism</a> would serve as the reminder that all is not well in the <a href="http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/3761/thesis_tshawane_n.pdf">land of the rainbow</a>. Little was it imagined that the death of Winnie Madikizela Mandela, a mere few weeks before the 24th celebration of freedom, would <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-04-18-gaping-wounds-and-the-clamber-to-contain-the-winnie-fallout/#.WuDmSGdfB2A">as painfully as it did</a>reopen the racial wounds of the apartheid system. </p>
<p>This sketch is but a few brush strokes that depict the story of South African freedom and liberty as it approaches its ‘silver’ anniversary next year. The <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329299027003003?journalCode=pasa">flaws</a> and shortcomings of the original promise are tangible. </p>
<p>But freedom in the South African mould is also an exhilarating and promising process. No settlement or solution will be taken for granted if it is not fit for purpose. The freedom of 1994 is evolving beyond the promises of the 1996 Constitution. It’s time for constitutional architects, and the politicians in government, to catch up.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95666/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Booysen has in the past received funding from Wits University.</span></em></p>South Africa marks 24 years of freedom amid continuous contests over over governance, economic justice as well as reconciliation and inclusion.Susan Booysen, Professor in the Wits School of Governance, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/956602018-04-26T10:33:07Z2018-04-26T10:33:07ZDare South Africans dream again as they celebrate their 23rd Freedom Day?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216463/original/file-20180426-175035-i95fpp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Quiet, but decisive action.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Andy Rain</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was just four and a half months ago that <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/cyril-matamela-ramaphosa">Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa</a> <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-politics/south-africas-ramaphosa-wins-election-as-anc-president-idUSKBN1EC05I">won the presidency</a> of the African National Congress (ANC) that governs South Africa.</p>
<p>Pundits said <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/mvi-hlophe/why-nkosazana-dlamini-zuma-will-be-the-next-president-of-the-anc_a_21627709/">at the time</a> that the post-colonial narrative was fixed: the ANC was irredeemably corrupt, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma would win and protect her ex Jacob Zuma and his legacy, and the decade-long nightmare of Zuma’s kleptocracy would become a decade longer and gloomier, by the end of South Africa would be bankrupt, broken and buggered.</p>
<p>But in the 128 days since Ramaphosa took over the reins, South Africans have had to learn again to imagine that they might be free, and to have hope in the future. 2018 may not feel like 1994, but it comes a close second. The will to believe is taking root. </p>
<p>Initially, and appropriately, Ramaphosa faced massive skepticism. He was deputy to Zuma’s presidency, he was one of the top six ANC officials and Zuma happened under his nose. South Africans <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2018-01-16-the-dangers-of-false-optimism-in-a-ramaphosa-presidency/#.WuCHaC-B3bM">were repeatedly</a> warned that he’d become leader – by a slim majority – of the same ANC that made Zuma. And that he would be weak, immobilised, imprisoned by the compromise among the <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/news/anc-conference/anc54-breaking-ramaphosa-elected-anc-president-12453127">top six</a> that got elected at the ANC conference to run the party.</p>
<p>Immediately after he won the ANC presidency, the beatific left tried to brand him ‘RamaZupta’, a moment of flatulent sloganeering that imploded as it came up against South Africans’ collective will to believe, and Ramaphosa’s actions. Opposition parties also suffered from a will to believe and a need to oppose. </p>
<p>The early signs were good but superficial – meetings <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1781626/anc-wants-a-new-culture-of-being-on-time-ramaphosa/">started on time</a>. Khoisan leaders on hunger strike, ignored by Zuma, were met by Ramaphosa, and <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/khoisan-four-head-home-for-christmas-after-ramophosa-meeting-20171224">left contented</a>. Small things, however, that at least hinted of bigger changes to come.</p>
<h2>Revenge is best served cold</h2>
<p>After a decade of watching, helpless, as South Africa was sliced and diced by venal hacks - whether corporate, political, local or foreign, slick or unutterably incompetent - what (most) people most wanted from Ramaphosa was vengeance. Heads needed to roll, and immediately. Bloodletting was needed, to heal the country from all that had gone before, whether in national, provincial or local spheres, in corporate boardrooms or state owned enterprises. </p>
<p>But South Africans have come to learn that Ramaphosa does not work that way. They’re learning that he’s the master of coincidence. </p>
<p>128 days ago, commentators predicted that Zuma would not step down, that he would present the State of the Nation address and so on - but the day dawned to the news that his close allies were being raided over corruption allegations. By 10pm Zuma had gone. Ramaphosa did not need to say or do anything. </p>
<p>And developments moved thick and fast with news that those who’d previously seemed untouchable, such as the <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/3-arrested-in-hawks-gupta-raids-20180214">Gupta family</a>, suddenly looked <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-net-about-to-close-on-zuma-and-his-gupta-patronage-network-90395">distinctly vulnerable</a>. The family is accused of having <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/download-the-full-state-of-capture-pdf-20161102">captured</a> the South African state, with the help of their friend, Zuma.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-01-25-in-full--state-capture-inquiry-to-probe-guptas-zuma-and-ministers/">Guptas</a>, with rather better-attuned political instincts than Zuma, had already <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1821809/update-1-ajay-gupta-on-the-run-sa-borders-on-high-alert/">packed up and gone </a>, leaving the odd, obscure relative to share the benches of accused as police opened dockets and <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2018-02-15-eight-accused-in-estina-farm-scandal-including-a-gupta-nephew-given-bail/">pressed charges</a>.</p>
<p>Some 120 days later, the North West province was in flames and demanding the <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1904620/violent-north-west-protests-spread-to-different-parts-of-the-province/">removal of Premier Supra Mahumapelo</a>. Coincidentally, again, the Sunday Times ran a front page story showing how Mahumapelo had allegedly defrauded a programme for aspirant black farmers to deliver 28 cows and a bull to a beaming Zuma <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/hawks-to-investigate-supras-alleged-cattle-gift-to-zuma-20180422">in 2016</a>. </p>
<p>Within a day, the formerly untouchable premier was reading from the script – I serve at the ANC’s pleasure, the ANC will tell me to stay or go, offering his head on a platter to Ramaphosa. What another lovely coincidence.</p>
<p>And in-between those coincidences? It’s barely three and a half months since Ramaphosa became president, and in that time the boards of state owned enterprises have been <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-shaking-up-south-africas-power-utility-matters-for-the-economy-90548">repopulated</a> by people who can spell governance, and former incompetent chairs and boot-lickers have been removed. And ministers know they need to perform or they’ll be fired. </p>
<p>Advisers of calibre and experience have been <a href="https://www.fin24.com/Economy/meet-trudi-makhaya-ramaphosas-new-economic-adviser-20180417">appointed</a>. Highly regarded ministers – fired by Zuma – have returned, and with a mission. </p>
<p>Tough policy issues have been tackled – most obviously, the land question. Whether the ANC needs to reform the Constitution to deal with this or not is moot: the ANC is finally facing up to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sazu3SxjaHc">‘the original sin’</a> as it must do, and is preparing to act. </p>
<p>It does appear that the ANC has grown a spine. It’s still a fragile thing, but it’s now visible. Those with dirty laundry know that the law enforcement agencies – themselves being repopulated – will be coming after them, allowing Ramaphosa to keep his hands clean of the endless <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2017-10-17-president-jacob-zuma-implements-his-12th-cabinet-reshuffle">purging and reshuffling</a> that marked Zuma’s decade in power.</p>
<p>There are ministers, top 6 officials and many, many more who are becoming rather nervous. Ramaphosa is sitting quietly in the background, flying economy class, sourcing investment, winning hearts and minds, and watching. Moving chess pieces quietly, but decisively. Knowing that coincidence has yet to run dry.</p>
<h2>South Africanism</h2>
<p>What matters most in all this are South Africans. They fought back, against the stagnant ANC through trade unions and NGOs, through foundations and the media, through academics and lawyers, they fought Zuma’s slide into the moral abyss. Citizens created the context for Ramaphosa to win.</p>
<p>South Africans refused to fit anyone’s narrative. For racists, the classic narrative is of decline into ‘big man leaders’ and ‘tin pot generals’. For the left, the narrative is remarkably similar, of big corporates and politicians out to screw the working class and benefit the tiny few at the top.</p>
<p>In both cases, the narrative failed. South Africans are more complex, more resilient, and frankly better than that. They are not overwhelmingly racist nutters or ideologues. In their diversity, South Africans still want what they wanted in 1994, and what the ANC promised – a <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/1994-national-elections-manifesto">better life for all </a>. </p>
<p>On Freedom Day – a public holiday that marks the first day on which all South Africans could vote – it is worth remembering that for all those who benefit from separating South Africans – by race, or ethnicity, or age, or nationality, or sexuality, or identity – the vast majority are decent, ordinary people who want a decent life, for themselves and for everyone else.</p>
<p>Ramaphosa seems to be reminding South Africans that politics is ultimately about thinking, planning and executing. It is not about plunging greedy fists into the trough, but about serving the public. It is not about the grand gesture, but about getting the job done, efficiently. By doing so, he is taking the racist post-colonial narrative and giving it a good kicking, while South Africans cheer.</p>
<p>Coincidence will not be enough, and no doubt Ramaphosa will suffer setbacks. But after 128 days of good fortune and clear minded action, it does seem that South Africa has emerged, blinking, into the sunlight, and may again hope and dream. That’s quite a gift for Freedom Day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95660/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Everatt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>President Cyril Ramaphosa’s term in office so far, makes it seem that South Africa can hope and dream again. That’s quite a gift for Freedom Day.David Everatt, Head of Wits School of Governance, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/941912018-04-25T13:07:36Z2018-04-25T13:07:36ZFossil teeth reveal new facts about a mass extinction 260 million years ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212947/original/file-20180403-189801-1hsf78a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A fossil tooth contains isotopes that offer clues of aridification.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Around 260 million years, the earth was dominated by mammal like reptiles called therapsids. The largest of these therapsids were the dinocephalians, a genus composed of several herbivorous and carnivorous species.</p>
<p>Then something enormous happened: a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4528552/">mass extinction event</a> killed off between 75% and 80% of all the creatures that lived on land around the world. Many ocean creatures were also rendered extinct. The dinocephalians were wiped out.</p>
<p>Several hypotheses have been offered about what could have provoked this mass extinction. For instance, many scientists have favoured the notion that a volcanic eruption was the trigger. It has been <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1179.full">demonstrated</a> that at the time of the extinction interval a gigantic volcanic eruption occurred at Emeishan in the south of China that lasted for almost two million years. It released <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090528142827.htm">around 300 000 km³ of lava</a>. </p>
<p>My colleagues and I wondered whether a change in climate might have caused or contributed to the mass extinction in South Africa. So we examined environmental change during the extinction event in what’s today the western and northern Cape of South Africa. We studied the fossil teeth of <em>Diictodon feliceps</em>, a small herbivorous therapsid which lived before the extinction event and survived through it (as with much else from this period, we don’t know how the species survived the catastrophe).</p>
<p><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1342937X18300777?via%3Dihub">Our findings</a> suggest that a local event rather than a global shift in climate was to blame for the mass extinction in South Africa. Specifically, we propose that <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1342937X15000520">deformations in the Cape Fold Mountains</a> meant there was less water available; species in the region were decimated. </p>
<p>This marks the first time that data has shown a correlation between the mass extinction event and an event of aridification – the process that occurs when a region becomes increasingly dry. It’s a long-term shift in climate rather than a seasonal variation. Our findings are supported by <a href="http://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/20615">earlier work</a> conducted on sediment which showed a decrease in river and stream output in the basin of the Cape Fold Mountains during that time.</p>
<p>It seems from this study that while the Emeishan eruption may have triggered the mass extinction event other more local events might have amplified it.</p>
<h2>Teeth reveal climate secrets</h2>
<p>Fossil teeth contain different atoms, like oxygen or carbon, which are represented with several “forms”, called isotopes. Examining their ratio allows scientists to interpret how the humidity and temperature were changing when the animal in question was alive. </p>
<p>The teeth we studied showed that an aridification – a decrease in humidity as produced by water supply or rainfall – occurred at the time of the extinction. But there was no change in temperature. This suggested that global climate change didn’t lead to the mass extinction, since in the case of global climate shifts humidity and temperature changes go together.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215014/original/file-20180416-560-onzy2o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Drakenstein Mountains are part of the Cape Fold Belt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Victoria Field</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our focus was on the stable oxygen and carbon isotope compositions in the fossil teeth. </p>
<p>Several factors can affect the ratio between the different isotope of these elements. For instance the ratio of oxygen isotopes is correlated with the air temperature of the environment; for carbon, the isotope ratio depends on the water availability. This makes it a good proxy to estimate an environment’s aridity. </p>
<p>Measuring the oxygen and carbon isotope composition in the teeth helped us estimate the temperature and the aridity of the environment where the animal lived.</p>
<h2>Future learning</h2>
<p>This kind of work is valuable because it shows how local climate events like aridification can affect a region’s ecosystems. It might also help climate change researchers to better estimate how certain parts of the planet might react as water becomes scarcer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94191/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Rey a reçu des financements de the Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST), National Research Foundation (NRF) African Origins platform of South Africa (grant no 98802 and no 84407) et DST/NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences.</span></em></p>A study has found that a local event rather than a global shift in climate caused the mass extinction in South Africa.Kevin Rey, Postdoctoral researcher, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/953112018-04-22T09:54:34Z2018-04-22T09:54:34ZWhy South Africa's DJ Black Coffee left a bitter taste by performing in Israel<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215618/original/file-20180419-163991-1cuwtx0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">DJ Black Coffee</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Instagram</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was a coincidence that South African house DJ <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/black-coffee-mn0002006338/biography">Black Coffee’s</a> <a href="https://www.news24.com/Video/SouthAfrica/News/outcry-over-black-coffees-performance-in-israel-20180404">recent performance</a> in Tel Aviv took place on the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/palestinians-march-to-gaza-border-for-start-of-six-week-protest-israel">same weekend</a> that saw more than a dozen Palestinian protesters shot dead, and more than a thousand wounded, by Israeli forces. But he was nevertheless <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/tshisa-live/tshisa-live/2018-04-03-dj-black-coffee-responds-to-israel-backlash--adds-fuel-to-the-fire/">criticised sharply</a> for the visit which came in the wake of <a href="https://bdsmovement.net/news/civil-society-organizations-around-world-urge-hp-companies-end-all-involvement-violations">calls</a> by political movements and civil society organisations to respect the boycott campaign against Israel.</p>
<p>Criticism was levelled against him from a number of fronts. This included South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) which <a href="https://www.channel24.co.za/The-Juice/News/anc-deeply-concerned-by-black-coffees-performance-in-israel-20180404">issued</a> a call on artists to remember the role played by the international <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/multimedia.php?id=65-259-13">anti-apartheid solidarity movement</a> in the isolation of apartheid South Africa:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The people of Palestine are in a just cause for self determination and we urge our artists not to form part of the normalisation of Israeli’s suppression of the Palestinian people in their quest for self determination and statehood that mirrors our very own struggle. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In response, the artist asserted his right to work as an entertainer and feed his family.</p>
<div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props='{"tweetId":"980743272577544192"}'></div>
<p>Born Nkosinathi Innocent Maphumulo, the hugely popular, multiaward winning Black Coffee is seen as the flag-bearer of South African Afro-house music. In 2015 he won the “Breakthrough DJ Of The Year” <a href="https://djawards.com/past-editions/dj-awards-2015/">award</a> in Ibiza and the next year he became the first South African to <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/7423180/black-coffee-first-south-african-bet-awards-dance">win a BET award</a> in the “best international act Africa” category. </p>
<p>Accolades like these, and many others, paved the way to international stardom with major DJ gigs and even more album sales. Because of this rising global profile, his decision to play in Israel caused a major stir.</p>
<h2>The case for the boycott</h2>
<p>Cases like Black Coffee’s aren’t rare. Many internationally renowned artists have faced <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/25/lorde-cancels-israel-concert-after-pro-palestinian-campaign">campaigns</a> to convince them not to perform in Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. The logic used has echoes of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/86-non-racial-sport">sports boycott campaigns</a> during the anti-apartheid struggle when the mantra was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>no normal sport in an abnormal society. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This approach should be particularly effective with South African artists. Theirs was a society that imposed the same kind of restrictions and segregationist policies currently pursued by Israel towards Palestinians. </p>
<p>But some artists have responded by arguing that they don’t get involved in politics. Or, they claim that their politics require that they treat all audiences equally. Some argue that music and art are forces that bring people together and therefore play a positive role regardless of politics. </p>
<p>These claims do not address the core issue: performing in a society experiencing intense conflict, against the wishes of a central constituency, which is largely prevented from attending, is itself a political statement. </p>
<p>Whether they intend it or not, artists who defy the boycott call are aligning themselves with the oppressive Israeli regime.</p>
<p>A common objection to this argument is that there are many oppressive regimes of various kinds, and that there’s therefore no reason to single out Israel for special treatment. </p>
<p>While the first part of this argument is true, the second doesn’t follow. The call to boycott Israel as a destination for artists, academics, sports people and cultural activists, does not stem from its oppressive policies as such. It stems from the fact that Israel runs a regime that amounts to <a href="http://jwtc.org.za/resources/docs/salon-volume-3/RanGreenstein_Israel.pdf">what I’ve described as</a> an apartheid of a special type. </p>
<p>Although not identical to the South African version, it meets the <a href="https://watermark.silverchair.com/cht045.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAbMwggGvBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggGgMIIBnAIBADCCAZUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMUKYRXVKys30SZbJYAgEQgIIBZl7v-IakvmCDjecXyc8ir6wueY1azdb7dKTkXRPZMrUE41QAB20cgWpMPcntQ4wrxUFyo6i-ap0BmotAeOnbmm5du9qKMgUXJfCah057wB3DbW4hM9qKuW55oLpW-q8Al0qI-4EFHLLuvjuNxjEI1nVW0fxpkhFWDxVGb0IyyqbukGoKJ6RXUWCc36GkvHsPqULbR8_E1zx6bfHowBLgvch5Yc-rRHW035uNICuV6_JEPb3Vga_X7UsmC2cO3duZ8uRHDNgIXyBaOERV5FbyWKLZh66ueKvGofXm9VXERUeFWCij9N4mMmM7Ht1Rpem5x5RC56Yah18aajTQwKKC5LDrhEFRIDBfuHdHBKFVRwQtef_Bp6_ukl5ZC2I6szcIEdzf8lDRy7Ic0w5jZRu6LpQKgoO4GCtexqWWKVYQ1ZikSjiyb_wRFr-2G__fioJh3QyF20vQ4qmlqBaTh8ldsFsh4FhJMwU">definition</a> of apartheid in international law: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In specific terms, Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/12/19/separate-and-unequal/israels-discriminatory-treatment-palestinians-occupied">forcibly dominated</a> by Israel <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29123668">since 1967</a>, cannot vote in elections to Israeli representative institutions. They have no say in the way they are <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/">ruled by Israel</a>, cannot move, trade and engage in normal economic activity freely. Their land, water and natural resources are <a href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2017/gaef3485.doc.htm">controlled by Israel</a>, which uses them to benefit its own (Jewish) citizens at their expense. </p>
<p>Needless to say, Palestinians couldn’t attend DJ Black Coffee’s performance in Tel Aviv. Only <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161228-explained-palestinian-citizens-of-israel/">15%</a> of the overall Palestinian population have Israeli citizenship and access to basic political rights. They too are subject to a range of formal and informal discriminatory mechanisms. </p>
<h2>The role of boycotts</h2>
<p>What role can culture play in global solidarity campaign against Israel? </p>
<p>Boycotting academic, cultural and sports activities in Israel is an essential part. But total avoidance may not be the most useful political strategy. It should be combined with activities that take place as part of political dissent and resistance efforts from within the country.</p>
<p>For example, a number of possible contributions can be made to Palestinian cultural freedom struggle. These can take a number of forms such as invitations to perform and exhibit, alternative funding to allow independence from state support, and activities that would help cultural workers to organise locally and spread their messages globally.</p>
<p>This can be done by: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Forging links with Palestinians and Israeli artists, performers and academics, who follow progressive programmes of action, and </p></li>
<li><p>Renouncing any links with the Israeli state and its funding mechanisms. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>This would allow for an effective counter to official policies of segregation and the isolation of critical voices.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ran Greenstein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Boycotting academic, cultural and sports activities in Israel is an essential part, but total avoidance may not be the most useful political strategy.Ran Greenstein, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/946462018-04-11T07:14:23Z2018-04-11T07:14:23ZHow the law can help change racist minds in South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/214076/original/file-20180410-587-1m2kst.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Much recent news and public discourse might seem to indicate that South Africa’s non-racial <a href="https://www.scholaradvisor.com/essay-examples/descriptive-essay-south-africa-rainbow-nation/">rainbow</a> is fading. Racism, its expression and its consequences, seem to be all around.</p>
<p>First prize goes to former real estate agent <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/vicki-momberg-sentenced-to-an-effective-2-years-in-prison-for-racist-rant-20180328">Vicki Momberg</a>. She was recently sentenced to a <a href="https://theconversation.com/jail-time-for-south-african-woman-using-racist-slur-sets-new-precedent-94179">three year</a> jail term (one year suspended) for the vicious racial abuse of black traffic officers and police emergency call centre operators attempting to help her after a smash and grab incident. </p>
<p>Then there is the <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-03-02-britain-must-intervene-in-sa-land-debate-says-member-of-european-parliament/">land reform debate</a>. Its enormous complexity is swept aside by both black populist politicians demanding the return of land “stolen” by whites and the white right claiming that white farmers are <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/SA-farmers-under-siege-20000906">under siege and fear for their lives</a>. </p>
<p>In reply to <em>Business Day</em> columnist Peter Bruce’s stating that the extent of farm murders has been grossly exaggerated, a white correspondent to the newspaper <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2018-04-05-letter-bruce-should-bury-hatchet/">cited</a> approvingly the man generally accepted as the architect of the brutal policy of apartheid, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/hendrik-frensch-verwoerd">Hendrik Verwoerd</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Verwoerd felt that the only way whites in SA would survive would be if some system could be devised to that they could maintain control of their destiny within a Western framework. Otherwise, they would simply be overwhelmed… Now we are experiencing what Verwoerd predicted. Whites are being bullied incessantly and deprived of their assets by black politicians.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How on earth should South Africans deal with all this? There is, frankly, no easy answer to this question. But here are a few considerations.</p>
<h2>Complex problem</h2>
<p>Journalist Joshua Carstens, writing on <em>News24</em>, suggested that Momberg’s crude racism was <a href="https://www.news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/changing-peoples-minds-and-hearts-about-race-lessons-from-vicki-momberg-20180406">“simply the tip of an iceberg”</a>. He had no quarrel with her sentence, but wondered whether it would work. He argued that while it might be possible to regulate people’s behaviour,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>you can’t legalise people’s minds and hearts. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unexpressed racism may be even more dangerous if it is left lurking below the surface. He went on to encourage like-minded whites to take a stronger stand against racism in their private lives. </p>
<p>Nothing wrong with that at all. Indeed, its sentiment is highly commendable. But, would it really be better if racists displayed their honesty by roundly abusing black people? Or is it better if they curb their lips for fear of joining Momberg in jail? </p>
<h2>Legislation changing minds</h2>
<p>It’s wrong, I think, to suggest that legislation cannot change minds. True, it might often take the long haul. But laws do more than reflect social norms: they mould them.</p>
<p>The law is meant to entrench what society thinks is right. If it prescribes that racism, sexism or homophobia are wrong, there is probably a better chance that people will come to accept it in genuine democracies (especially over the generations). But the law can also be used to effect structural change.</p>
<p>Take for instance <a href="http://www.dti.gov.za/economic_empowerment/bee.jsp">black economic empowerment</a> and <a href="https://www.labourguide.co.za/employment-equity/summary-of-the-employment-equity-act-55-of-1998-issued-in-terms-of-section-25-1">equity employment legislation</a>. Their pros and cons are much debated, yet it seems difficult to deny that without them, South Africa would have a much stronger white minority profile today than it would without them. </p>
<p>For all their faults, such laws and associated state pressures for “demographic representivity” would seem to have been a necessary element in decolonising society. This is not to deny that they come with numerous difficulties. </p>
<p>This is shown by the case of Mark Lamberti, chief executive officer of Imperial Holdings. He called Adila Chowan, a Muslim Indian woman who had become group financial manager at the company’s subsidiary, a <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/former-amh-employee-wins-race-and-gender-discrimination-case-20180402">“female employment equity”</a> candidate in the presence of other senior managers. Lamberti was convicted in the High Court of impairing her dignity and ordered to pay her costs and yet to be decided damages.</p>
<p>Lamberti has responded by insisting that he is <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1880989/mark-lamberti-resigns-from-eskom-board-following-court-judgment/">not a racist</a>. Whether or not his actions were racist were not dealt with by the court; the <a href="https://www.biznews.com/leadership/2018/04/06/chowan-imperial-lessons-judgement-sa-corporate-executives/">judgment</a> was that he had offended the complainant’s dignity. Whether or not one’s view is that he was racist and/or sexist, it is beyond doubt that his behaviour was thoroughly crass. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, it points to a dilemma.</p>
<h2>Constructive ambiguity</h2>
<p>Equity employment is designed to promote fairness in the workplace and black upward mobility in the face of white structural privilege. But the irony is, as Chowan has so bravely <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-04-06-00-my-victory-should-help-all-women">highlighted</a>, black and female candidates resent being labelled as equity employment candidates. </p>
<p>They point out, correctly, that it is demeaning to any black or woman appointee to say that they got the job because they were black or female. They want to be recognised as having been appointed on merit. Yet the problem is that without such goads as equity employment legislation, progress towards racial equality in the workplace would almost certainly be a lot slower.</p>
<p>South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sunday-times/20180408/281569471299652">wrestling with this very issue </a>. The party has long claimed that it has become <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/maimane-stands-firm-on-diversity-20180407">increasingly racially diverse</a> as the governing ANC has in practice and much rhetoric withdrawn from non-racialism. Yet although the DA now has a black leader in Mmusi Maimane, there has been rising discontent among its black membership that the party is still dominated by a <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2016-01-28-das-black-leaders-live-with-racism">conservative old guard of whites</a>.</p>
<p>This has led to calls for the introduction of race-based quotas, which many in the party have resisted. They complain that such group determined racial categorisation would run against the DA’s liberalism, which is based on the advancement of individual rights. </p>
<p>Reportedly, the party’s senior leadership arrived at a compromise proposal for putting to the DA’s federal congress which committed it to taking,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>active steps to promote and advance diversity… without recourse to rigid formulae or <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/sunday-times/20180408/281569471299652">quotas</a>. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Complex problem</h2>
<p>What should be drawn from all this? Probably many things. But one certainty is that more humility is necessary from all those engaged in the debate. People must accept that there are no easy answers. The project of rendering South Africa more equal is one of enormous complexity, fraught with as many philosophical problems as structural and political ones. </p>
<p>Alas, there will be more Mombergs, more Lambertis and more people seeking to revive Verwoerd and render his memory respectable. There will be more black populism in response. </p>
<p>Yes, it’s almost certainly going to be a rough ride, but those South Africans who don’t believe or don’t want to believe that a better South Africa is possible should be honest about it – and bugger off elsewhere.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94646/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Southall receives funding from National Research Foundation</span></em></p>Unexpressed racism may be even more dangerous if it's left lurking below the surface.Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/943382018-04-09T14:54:20Z2018-04-09T14:54:20ZFlu vaccines for pregnant moms protect them against whooping cough<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213136/original/file-20180404-189801-e035jb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The influenza virus circulates every year and has the potential to turn into global epidemics. Flu virus infections affect people from all age groups and causes mild to severe illness. But newborns and babies younger than six months are at particular risk for serious disease.</p>
<p>Pregnant women are also increasingly susceptible to catching severe flu in their second and third trimesters and in the first six months after giving birth. Because of this, pregnant women have been identified as a priority group to receive the flu vaccine. </p>
<p>In addition to pregnant women, elderly people, people with chronic diseases or those who have HIV are also prioritised to get it. People with HIV have a high risk of getting severe flu because their immune systems are compromised by the virus. The flu vaccine is normally administered in South Africa from February until the end of the winter season in August. </p>
<p>But the challenge is that babies younger than six months old are unable to get the flu vaccine. This leaves them vulnerable. <a href="http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43640/9280640489_eng.pdf;jsessionid=3BBC31872FCEB004DB436737F138D046?sequence=1">Global studies</a> on childhood deaths show that almost 1 million children younger than five die every year from pneumonia and that 45% of all deaths in children under the age of five occur in <a href="http://www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/en/">the first month of life</a>. In South Africa, the neonatal death rate sits at 14.6/ 1000 live births. </p>
<p>We set out to establish whether giving mothers the flu vaccine while they were pregnant could protect them from getting the flu and protect their babies in this first six month period. </p>
<p>We had two important findings. <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1401480">Our study primarily found</a> that giving pregnant mothers the flu vaccine protected their babies from getting the flu in the first six months of life – before they were eligible to get the vaccine themselves. The mothers themselves were also protected from getting sick from flu. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5810468/">secondary analysis of the findings</a> has shown that when the flu vaccine was administered to pregnant women they were also protected from developing whooping cough.</p>
<h2>A double hit</h2>
<p>Research shows that children under the age of six months have the highest burden of respiratory diseases such as influenza and whooping cough, known as <a href="http://www.nicd.ac.za/assets/files/Pertussis%20FAQ_final_20170111_%20corrected%20date%20on%20bottom_30Jan2017.pdf">pertussis</a>. </p>
<p>Pertussis is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the bacterium <em>Bordetella pertussis</em>. Anyone can get pertussis, which is spread from person to person when an infected person coughs or sneezes. But some people face a higher risk of infection and severe disease. Those with weakened immune systems and chronic lung disease are at higher risk. For babies younger than six months, the disease poses the greatest risk because they are more likely to develop complications and die. </p>
<p>The pertussis vaccine is part of the routine vaccination schedule for all babies in the country. The vaccine, which is administered globally, has significantly reduced the case load of whooping cough. </p>
<p>The challenge is that although babies start their pertussis vaccinations when they are six weeks old, they are only protected against the disease after their third dose of the vaccine when they are three months old. This means that they are particularly vulnerable. Protecting them is a priority in many developing countries, including South Africa.</p>
<p>In our randomised clinical trial we administered the flu vaccine and a placebo to two groups of women. When they received the vaccine they were in their late second or third pregnancy trimester. </p>
<p>Our study proved that the women who received the influenza vaccine had less pertussis infections. But the protection they got from the vaccine was indirect. It stopped them from getting influenza which in turn protected them from getting a co-infection of pertussis. </p>
<h2>An alternative</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1401480">Our study</a> shows that there are significant benefits to pregnant women being given the influenza vaccine. But there is still a huge gap in the number of people being vaccinated in the country. </p>
<p>Although the government has increased the number of vaccines made available through the public health system over the past few years, the number being administered is still wholly inadequate. </p>
<p>Influenza vaccination should nonetheless be a priority for all high risk groups.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94338/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marta C. Nunes receives funding from Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, Foundation for Influenza Epidemiology, MedImmune</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Cutland receives funding from The Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation. </span></em></p>Giving pregnant mothers the flu vaccine protected their babies from getting the flu in the first six months of life.Marta C. Nunes, Reader and Senior Scientist at the Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit, University of the WitwatersrandClare Cutland, Deputy Director at the Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/944262018-04-08T10:12:20Z2018-04-08T10:12:20ZAncient DNA changes everything we know about the evolution of elephants<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213141/original/file-20180404-189824-1h993o7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paleoloxodon antiquus has been extinct for 120 000 years.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APaleoloxodon_antiquus.jpg">By Apotea (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For a long time, zoologists assumed that there were only two species of elephant: one Asian and one African. Then genetic analyses suggested that the African Elephant could be divided into <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/293/5534/1473">two distinct species</a>, the African Forest and African Savannah elephants.</p>
<p>Now a new elephant has been added to the mix. The <em>palaeoloxodan antiquus</em> has been extinct for 120 000 years. This elephant roamed Europe and western Asia during the last ice age, about 400 000 years ago. <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/02/16/1720554115">A study</a> of its DNA shows that this supposedly European animal is actually the African forest elephants’ closest relative. <a href="https://elifesciences.org/articles/25413">Another study</a> by the same team found that at a genetic level, it may even have more in common with the modern African forest elephant than the African savannah elephant. </p>
<p>This study changes everything we thought we knew about the evolutionary history and ancestry of modern elephants and their closest relatives. It also shows that the African elephant’s lineage was not confined to Africa; the animals actually went out of the continent, which we didn’t know before. It roamed Europe and – through a lot of interbreeding – left its genetic mark far from its original stomping grounds.</p>
<p>The new find, based on DNA from fossils found in Germany, may also shed light on a DNA discrepancy that has puzzled scientists for some time.</p>
<h2>The evolution of elephants</h2>
<p><em>Palaeoloxodon antiquus</em> is known as the straight-tusked elephant because of its distinctive and somewhat bizarre appearance. Its ancestors, the <em>Palaeoloxodon recki</em>, lived in Africa between 3.5 millon and 100 000 years ago. Fossils show that the straight-tusked elephants arrived in Eurasia around 750 000 years ago and that they left Africa through the Middle East.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213387/original/file-20180405-189795-13onw6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213387/original/file-20180405-189795-13onw6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Julien Benoit</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Once it reached Europe, the <em>Palaeoloxodon antiquus</em> had to adapt to new conditions. One of its new homes was the island of Sicily and, as is common when large animals settle on an island, it evolved into a dwarf species. This is a way for large animals to deal with the paucity of resources common on islands.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2014.991021">own research</a> on this dwarf elephant, <em>Palaeoloxodon falconeri</em> has shown that this remarkable species had an exceptionally large brain. In fact, it’s the only animal species ever recorded with a brain size comparable to a human’s.</p>
<p>There’s a problem, though: <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00239-002-2337-x">DNA revealed</a> some years ago that the <em>Palaeoloxodon falconeri</em> wasn’t descended from or related to any of the African elephant species as expected. Its closest relative was actually the Asian elephant.</p>
<p>That made no sense. How could the straight-tusked elephant be related to African elephants and its dwarf descendant be related to Asian elephants? Was that study wrong? The new study, which examined <em>Palaeoloxodon antiquus</em> DNA, could help unravel the mystery. </p>
<p>This is because the <em>Palaeoloxodon antiquus’</em> DNA appears to be a mixture of many species’ DNA, which would have happened when they interbred. This process, known as admixture, probably occurred once <em>Palaeoloxodon</em> left Africa. That’s how its descendents ended up with Asian elephant DNA, and even DNA from the famous woolly mammoth. </p>
<p>It is possible that a small chunk of the dwarf elephant’s DNA analysed years ago was extracted from a fragment of sequence inherited from the Asian elephant – and its other origins weren’t picked up.</p>
<h2>DNA speaks</h2>
<p>This new information about elephants’ evolution and history is extremely exciting. It shows that the two modern African elephant species are heirs of a glorious and evolutionary successful past which still survives and speaks through their DNA. Conservation efforts therefore do not only preserve species, they also save the genetic memories of these peaceful giants.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94426/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julien Benoit receives funding from The Claude Leon Foundation; PAST and its Scatterlings projects; the National Research Foundation of South Africa; and the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences (CoE in Palaeosciences).</span></em></p>DNA studies reveal that African elephants belong to a very successful and widespread family.Julien Benoit, Postdoc in Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/941292018-04-08T10:11:47Z2018-04-08T10:11:47ZSteinhoff's board behaved badly. Why it needs to be held to account<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213551/original/file-20180406-125177-pijet0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>It’s becoming clearer by the day that the rot that caused the <a href="https://theconversation.com/did-steinhoffs-board-structure-contribute-to-the-scandal-89704">corporate scandal</a> at furniture retailing giant Steinhoff International goes much deeper than one man – the CEO Markus Jooste – who has come to represent the crisis. </p>
<p>The company is accused of overstating its earnings among other accounting irregularities in a case describe as an <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/retail-and-consumer/2017-12-18-how-investors-bought-into-the-steinhoff-success-story-despite-the-red-flags/">Enron type</a> company failure. </p>
<p>The accounting scandal, which caused a more than €10 billion collapse in Steinhoff’s share price, has focused blame on Jooste while executives around him have <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/latest-results/Steinhoff%20trading%20update%20Q1%202018.pdf">dodged responsibility</a>. Surely Jooste could not change accounting entries without help?</p>
<p>The behaviour of the Steinhoff board, since the scandal exploded in December last year, confirms my early suspicions. The rot runs deeper. This is clear from the appalling manner in which the board has managed the unfolding crisis. It’s been four months since Steinhoff was enveloped by the accounting scandal. And there’s no resolution in sight, let alone a proper diagnosis. </p>
<p>The board has called an annual general meeting but the shareholders will not receive financial statements before the meeting. Naturally it is a legal obligation to call an annual general meeting, but similarly the publication of financial statements is also a legal obligation. </p>
<p>It’s really hard to imagine that a serving board of any company can claim that it had no insight in its financial affairs and trusted only in the judgement of the CEO. This makes the board redundant. Such a lack of insight must also be a breach of company law, as the legislation clearly states that the board is responsible for the financial statements.</p>
<p>And to add insult to injury the AGM’s agenda included a proposal for some directors to be paid an <a href="https://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-opinion/steinhoffs-proposed-extra-payments-to-directors-are-obscene/">additional amount</a>, ostensibly for extra effort in managing the crisis, that is to clean up their mess. Public pressure forced the company to <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/235893/steinhoff-shelves-plan-to-pay-director-bonuses/">withdraw</a> this strange remuneration proposal. Simply suggesting such a payment in the first place shows that the board members in question lack the required insight and intelligence to act at this level and to appreciate the depth of the crisis at hand.</p>
<h2>South Africa’s biggest corporate failure</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/library/2016/1/Annual%20report%202016_1.pdf">Steinhoff</a> grew out of South Africa to have a sizeable representation across sub-Saharan Africa, western Europe, Australasia and the US. At its peak it had amassed market valuation of about €20 billion with <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/library/2016/1/Annual%20report%202016_1.pdf">revenue</a> of about €10 billion. About half of that market value was <a href="https://theconversation.com/steinhoff-scandal-points-to-major-gaps-in-stopping-unethical-corporate-behaviour-88905">wiped out</a> when the scandal of accounting irregularities surfaced in December last year and subsequently much more has been wiped out. This makes Steinhoff the biggest corporate failure in South Africa’s history.</p>
<p>When the scandal broke, Jooste <a href="https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/companies-and-deals/steinhoff-ceo-markus-jooste-quits/">fell on his sword</a>. And so did a couple of <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/companies/retail-and-consumer/2018-01-18-jayendra-naidoo-is-latest-steinhoff-director-to-resign/">other board members</a>. Jooste has taken some <a href="https://probonomatters.co.za/2017/12/the-steinhoff-saga-markus-joostes-weak-mea-culpa-2/">personal responsibility</a> in a vague letter of apology to Steinhoff employees. </p>
<p>He’s since <a href="https://www.fin24.com/Companies/Retail/mps-resolves-to-subpoena-markus-jooste-20180328">gone to ground</a>, even rejecting a call to appear before a parliamentary enquiry into the debacle in South Africa. The remaining members of the board have <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/latest-results/Steinhoff%20trading%20update%20Q1%202018.pdf">pleaded innocence</a>. </p>
<p>But they should be held to account and not let off the hook.</p>
<h2>Poor board behaviour</h2>
<p>When the scandal came to light the board resolved to suspend the release of financial statements for the 12 months ended September 2017. The <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/latest-results/Steinhoff%20trading%20update%20Q1%202018.pdf">reasons</a> given may have been reasonable. They included the fact that accounting firm PwC had been appointed to conduct <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/latest-results/Steinhoff%20trading%20update%20Q1%202018.pdf">a forensic investigation</a> following allegations of accounting irregularities. And it was almost a certainty that previous financial results, from 2016 going back, were going to be <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/latest-results/Steinhoff%20trading%20update%20Q1%202018.pdf">restated</a>.</p>
<p>And so the group announced that it could not release the 2017 financial statement in expected time. <a href="https://www.jse.co.za/content/JSERulesPoliciesandRegulationItems/JSE%20Listings%20Requirements.pdf">Regulation</a> demands that financial statement of listed companies be released within three months of the financial year end.</p>
<p>The Steinhoff board recently announced scheduling of the next <a href="http://www.steinhoffinternational.com/downloads/2018/AGM%20Notice%202018.pdf">annual general meeting</a> for shareholders on the 20th of April 2018. But there’s no mention that financial statements will be tabled at the meeting. This must be read with section 30 of the South African <a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/32121_421_0.pdf">Companies Act</a> which stipulates that financial statements must be presented to the first shareholders meeting after the statements have been approved by the board.</p>
<p>This raises the question: Is there any sense in hosting an annual general meeting without financial statements for the shareholders to consider, despite legal stipulations for a meeting of shareholders to be called? </p>
<h2>Insult to injury</h2>
<p>Granted, the odd remuneration proposal has been <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/235893/steinhoff-shelves-plan-to-pay-director-bonuses/">withdrawn</a>. But its still a worthwhile exercise to zoom in on it.</p>
<p>It was a proposal to extend to some members of the board a further once-off payment to cover additional work undertaken during the period since the accounting irregularities were identified in December 2017. The fact that anybody at Steinhoff considered this a sound proposal shows that the board and executive management of the company have lost touch with the reality of shareholder anger and of the duties of board members.</p>
<p>According to this proposal board member, Steve Booysen and Heather Sonn were to be paid an additional €200,000 and Johan van Zyl be paid an additional €100,000. </p>
<p>The notice stated that the unfolding scandal made it necessary for the board members in question to do extra work, thus deserving extra payment. This is ludicrous. These board members were in the first instance responsible for the crisis. It therefore boggles the mind that these directors had any expectation to be paid extra for dealing with the crisis that they are to be blamed for in the first instance.</p>
<p>At the same time Steinhoff announced that an Independent Committee comprising some of its board members, inter alia, … focused on establishing a sound governance structure. This was a board function before the collapse, but was clearly seriously lacking before the crisis. ​</p>
<p>It’s clear that these board members of Steinhoff live in a different reality where shame does not exist.</p>
<p>In my mind the election and remuneration of board members can be dealt with simply and elegantly: remaining board members who served during the period of value destruction should quietly “disappear”. And they should also do the honourable thing and repay board fees that they clearly did not deserve, given that they didn’t discharge their responsibilities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94129/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jannie Rossouw is has a C research rating fro the NRF. He owns shares in Steinhoff. </span></em></p>All Steinhoff directors should be held accountable for the international corporate scandal.Jannie Rossouw, Head of School of Economic & Business Sciences, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/943002018-04-03T13:03:05Z2018-04-03T13:03:05ZWinnie Madikizela-Mandela: revolutionary who kept the spirit of resistance alive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212924/original/file-20180403-189807-1gv4h4d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African liberation struggle icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has died at the age of 81.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Jon Hrusha</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>No other woman – in life and after – occupies the place that <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/winnie-madikizela-mandela">Winnie Madikizela-Mandela</a> does in South African politics. A stalwart of the African National Congress (ANC), she nevertheless stands above, and at times outside, the party. Her iconic status transcends political parties and geographical boundaries, generations and genders. Poets have <a href="http://alicewalkersgarden.com/2016/09/winnie-mandela-we-love-you/">honoured her</a>, writers have <a href="http://panmacmillan.co.za/catalogue/the-cry-of-winnie-mandela/">immortalised her</a> and photographers have <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/winnie-mandela?sort=mostpopular&amp;mediatype=photography&amp;phrase=winnie%20mandela&amp;family=editorial">adored her</a>. </p>
<p>Her life has been overburdened by tragedies and dramas, and by the expectations of a world hungry for godlike heroes on whom to pin all its dreams, and one-dimensional villains on whom to pour its rage. Yet perhaps it is in the smaller and more intimate stories of our stumbling to make a better world that we are best able to recognise and appreciate the meaning of the life of Madikizela-Mandela. </p>
<p>In her particular life, we may see more clearly the violence wrought by colonialism and apartheid, the profound consequences of fraternal political movements to whom women were primarily ornamental and, yes, the tragic mistakes made in the crucible of civil war. </p>
<p>Her political power stemmed from the visceral connection that she was able to make between the everyday lives of black people in a racist state, and her own individual life. State power, in all its vicious dimensions, was exaggerated in its response to her indomitable will – and in its stark visibility, personified. </p>
<p>Fearless in the face of torture, imprisonment, banishment and betrayal, she stood firm in her conviction that apartheid could be brought down. She said what she liked, and bore the consequences. Her very life was a form of bearing witness to the brutality of the system. </p>
<h2>A life of misrecognition</h2>
<p>Many obituaries will outline the broad sweep of her life; few will mark the extent to which her revolutionary ideas were shaped before she even met Nelson Mandela. To most of her social circle in the 1950s, for a long time into the 1980s, and certainly for Nelson Mandela’s biographers, Madikizela-Mandela was a young rural naif who charmed the most eligible (married) man in town.</p>
<p>This way of seeing her as primarily beautiful, and not as an emerging political figure, has coloured both contemporaneous accounts of Madikizela-Mandela (for she was surely too young and beautiful to have a serious political idea) as well as scholarly accounts of the period (which focused on the thoughts and actions of men). </p>
<p>This misrecognition resonated in the ANC, which had no way of accommodating Madikizela-Mandela’s political qualities other than by casting her in the familiar tropes of wife and mother. Astutely, she embraced the role of mother and wife of a political leader and fashioned it into a platform for her own variant of radicalism, drawing on recent memories of the forcible dispossession of land and its impact on the Eastern Cape peasantry, and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/definition-black-consciousness-bantu-stephen-biko-december-1971-south-africa">black consciousness</a>. </p>
<p>She kept those traditions alive in the ANC, especially in the everyday politics of the townships, when the leadership of the party was crafting new forms of non-racialism and at times vilifying black consciousness. Even though she was not part of the inner circle of the black consciousness movement, being older than the students leading it at its height, she was an ally in words and spirit. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212927/original/file-20180403-189801-16jx8st.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Madikizela-Mandela in a T-shirt bearing the image of Chris Hani.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Kim Ludbrook</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the tumult after the <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/sidebar.php?id=65-258-3">1976 uprising</a>, she built a bridge between different political factions. In the early 1990s, when Nelson Mandela was urging armed youths to give up violent strategies, it was Madikizela-Mandela they called on (along with the then leader of the South African Communist Party <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/thembisile-chris-hani">Chris Hani</a>) to defend their change in tactics. </p>
<p>She played a similar role in brokering between moderates and radicals in the ANC and its breakaways up until her death. This was a form of gendered politics made possible by her status as mother of the nation, uniting warring sons and holding together her political family, even if peace was maintained only in her presence. </p>
<h2>White power and black suffering</h2>
<p>Winnie Madikizela was born in a rural Eastern Cape village called Bizana in September 1936. Her parents, Columbus and Gertrude, were teachers and her childhood was marked by the stern Methodism of her mother and the radical Africanist orientation of her father. </p>
<p>Rural life, with its entrenched gender roles, shaped her childhood. Not only was she aware of her mother’s desire to bear another son, but she and her sisters were expected to care for their male siblings. She was barely eight when her mother died months after giving birth to Winnie’s brother. Her childhood was cut short, and she had to leave school for six months to work in the fields and to carry out, with her sisters, all the daily chores of the household, from preparing food to cleaning. In her large and rambunctious family in which her parents upheld discipline with physical punishment, she learned to defend herself with her fists, if necessary.</p>
<p>Her rural background made her aware of land dispossession as a central question of freedom. By her own account, she learnt about the racialised system of power early in her life. From her father, she learnt about the Xhosa wars against the colonisers, and later would imagine herself as picking up where her ancestors <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Part-My-Soul-Went-Him/dp/0393302903">had failed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If they failed in those nine Xhosa wars, I am one of them of them and I will start from where those Xhosas left off and get my land back.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She was to retain the theme of land dispossession by colonialism throughout her political career. Associated with this was the idea that race was central to colonialism. Taught by her grandmother that the source of black suffering was white power, her framing of politics was defined completely by the ways in which her family understood the relations of colonialism, and by their personal experiences of humiliation. </p>
<p>As with many other ANC members with Eastern Cape roots, she did not think of urban struggles as the only space of resistance, or workers as the only agents of change. She <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=HD7U2a1Sp-0C&amp;pg=PA34&amp;lpg=PA34&amp;dq=The+white+makes+a+mistake,+thinking+the+tribal+black+is+subservient+and+docile.&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=1YSWJjmA1F&amp;sig=I1HuHC3iaevTwHkDcAgd1P6rMfI&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjW4JyJ2p3aAhVmC8AKHSnXBlIQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&amp;q=The%20white%20makes%20a%20mistake%2C%20thinking%20the%20tribal%20black%20is%20subservient%20and%20docile.&amp;f=false">warned</a>, in 1985, that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The white makes a mistake, thinking the tribal black is subservient and docile. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Militant to the core</h2>
<p>After six short years together, Madikizela-Mandela’s husband, Nelson, was sentenced to <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/nelson-mandela-sentenced-to-life-imprisonment-44-years-ago">life imprisonment</a>. By this stage, she too was inextricably involved in the national liberation movement, politics with single parenting. She was attuned to the mood of people, and was more of an empathic leader than a theorist or tactician. </p>
<p>She was an effective speaker, and had a gift for winning over an audience. Adelaide Joseph, a friend and fellow ANC activist, <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Part-of-My-Soul-Went-with-Him/">recalls</a> that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when she made her first public speech…right on the spot, while she was speaking, the women composed a song for Winnie Mandela. And they started to sing right in the hall.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She joined the ANC Women’s League and the <a href="http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&amp;c=AD1137/R/">Federation of South African Women</a>, and participated in several campaigns. She was militant to the core. On one occasion, when a policeman arrived at her house with a summons and dared to pull her arm, she assaulted him and had to defend herself in court for the action.</p>
<p>She was far from being a bystander, or a passive wife patiently waiting for her husband’s release from prison. In her autobiography, Madikizela-Mandela credits several other women for influencing her politically. Among these were Lilian Ngoyi, Florence Matomela, Frances Baard and Kate Molale, all leaders of the Federation. </p>
<p>For her, they were the “top of the ANC hierarchy” although at the time no women were in fact in any formal leadership positions in the ANC. The ANC only <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/women-and-african-national-congress-1912-1943">allowed women to become full members in 1943</a>, and during the 1950s, women were locked in an intense battle for recognition within the movement. </p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/anc-womens-league-ancwl">ANC Women’s League</a> and in the Federation, she held positions as chairperson of her branch in Orlando, and was a member of their provincial and national executives. In the 1970s, with her close friend Fatima Meer, she formed the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/black-womens-federation">Black Women’s Federation</a>. It was a short lived organisation with few campaigns, but signalled an adherence to the new township based politics that was sweeping the country. </p>
<p>Her mode of work in any case was not that of painstaking organisation-building; she was more capable as a public speaker and as someone who could connect with people in the harsh conditions of life in apartheid’s townships. She attended funerals and counselled families, acts of public courage that sustained activists. She offered a form of intimate political leadership, instinctively aligning herself with people in distress. </p>
<p>Gender was her political resource, enabling her to draw on effective qualities to form political communities and providing a mode in which she could enter into the lives of people in the townships. She embraced the role of mother and wife of a political leader and fashioned it into a platform from which she challenged the apartheid state. </p>
<h2>Banishment and brutality</h2>
<p>If the apartheid state had hoped to break her, they failed. She was fearless in the face of the state’s attempts to silence her. Her home was repeatedly invaded and searched, and she was arrested, assaulted and imprisoned several times. Then, in 1977, in an act of extreme cruelty, she was served with a banishment order to a place in the Free State called Brandfort – a place she had never heard of nor had she ever visited. </p>
<p>It was a horrendous uprooting from her family and community in Soweto, a form of exile that she described as “my little Siberia.” Madikizela-Mandela grasped very clearly the power that could derive from associating actions against her with actions against the nation. As <a href="http://www.storiadelledonne.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Hassim2014.pdf">she put it</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>When they send me into exile, it’s not me as an individual they are sending. They think that with me they can also ban the political ideas. But that is a historic impossibility… I am of no importance to them as an individual. What I stand for is what they want to banish. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But although the state did not break Winnie, by her own account it did brutalise her. Talking about her long period of solitary confinement and torture in 1969, she told a journalist that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>that imprisonment of eighteen months in solitary confinement did actually change me … We were so brutalised by that experience that I then believed in the language of violence and the only to deal with, to fight, apartheid was through the same violence they were unleashing against us and that is how one gets affected by that type of brutality. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The consequences were awful, not just for her but also for <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/graduations/2014---2012/biography-paul-verryn.html">Paul Verryn</a>, and especially for the families of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/stompie-seipeis-murderer-goes-jail">Stompie Seipei</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dr-abu-baker-asvat">Abu Asvat</a>. This period in her life, and in South African politics generally, is one that will not only occupy our moral energies, but also shape the ways in which narratives of violence in the 1980s are written. These were dark times in a country weighed down by states of emergency and militarised control. The exaggerated quality of Madikizela-Mandela’s life had to bear, too, the nightmares of our nation’s struggles to free itself. </p>
<p>The ANC could barely contain the nature of leadership that Winnie represented. Like many women in the movement, she was marginalised from its powerful decision making structures. Unlike male leaders, her personal life was constantly under the spotlight (no doubt aided by a zealous security machinery that kept her under constant surveillance), and she was judged harshly and unfairly for her private choices. Although she was a masterful player of the familial categories of wife and mother, she felt reduced by them too.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212929/original/file-20180403-189827-13ajmv1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winnie with Nelson Mandela after his release from prison in 1990.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Stringer</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Commentators like to use words such as maverick and wayward to describe her, but these tendencies developed because the regular structures of the ANC could not easily accommodate a powerful woman with a radical voice. Stepping outside the agreed parameters of the official party line, as she frequently did, was a form of asserting her independence, a form of refusal of the terms of political cadreship that were available to women in the ANC and in society more generally. It also allowed her to build alliances with the new voices emerging after 1994, from standing with the <a href="http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2002/16.html">Treatment Action Campaign</a> against Thabo Mbeki’s policies on HIV/AIDS, to supporting the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters. It accounts for the tremendous affection for her among young activists who are equally wary of the sedimented power structures in politics.</p>
<p>The endless stream of photographs that picture her in romantic embrace with Nelson Mandela, even now in her death, and despite their divorce, miss this fundamental point: the marriage was only a small part of her life, not its definitive point. To present her simply as wife, mostly as mother, is to erase the many struggles she waged to be defined in her own terms.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94300/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shireen Hassim receives funding from the AW Mellon Foundation for a project entitled Governing Intimacies. </span></em></p>Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's political power stemmed from the visceral connection that she was able to make between the lives of the oppressed black people, and her own.Shireen Hassim, Professor of Political Studies, WiSER, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/937972018-03-27T13:09:01Z2018-03-27T13:09:01ZRamaphosa has started the clean up job. But can he turn the state around?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211567/original/file-20180322-54875-kjykfn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, is on a mission to rebuild a battered party and state. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Nic Bothma</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South Africa’s new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, is presently receiving numerous <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/opinion-and-analysis/2018-03-03-ramaphosas-cabinet-clean-up-shows-promising-signs-of-what-lies-ahead/">plaudits</a> on how he’s handling the transition from the troubled Jacob Zuma presidency.</p>
<p>Zuma’s generals have been scattered, his underlings fleeing the battlefield. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, against whom Ramaphosa fought for the leadership and under whose wing Zuma thought he would be able to shelter had she won, has been brought into the <a href="https://www.ujuh.co.za/cyril-ramaphosas-new-cabinet-a-balancing-game-with-key-victories/">cabinet</a> and safely neutralised.</p>
<p>The ousting of Zuma has also had a dramatic impact on the major opposition parties. Both the Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have been deprived of their strongest electoral attraction. </p>
<p>The DA is now in a state of major disarray, attempting to resolve its various internal squabbles. For the moment at least – it seems to be heading towards a bloody nose at the 2019 election. </p>
<p>The EFF has played the brief post-Zuma moment more skillfully, most notably by getting the ANC to back its motion in parliament, albeit with amendments, in favour of expropriation of land without compensation. But Ramaphosa has responded in kind by subtly extending an invitation to the EFF to rejoin the ANC, a ploy which will continually compel it to justify its continuing existence, especially if the ruling party continues to steal its policy clothes.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Ramaphosa continues to bask in the admiration of whites and seems likely to bring disaffected elements of the black middle class back into the ANC. He has brought back hopes of better days for a previously despondent South Africa. </p>
<p>He is master of all the surveys, Mr Action and Mr Clean. </p>
<p>Yet the new president is no fool. He knows that his major challenge, after the depradations of the Zuma years, is to work towards making what he termed in his inauguration speech, a “<a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2018-02-16-in-full--read-cyril-ramaphosas-first-state-of-the-nation-address/">capable state</a>”. This revolves around addressing challenges of governance, the party as well as the economy.</p>
<h2>Low hanging fruit</h2>
<p>Ramaphosa has had little option but to first turn to addressing immediate problems within the state. The early steps have been relatively easy. The most straight forward task has been to shuffle the cabinet. By doing so he was able to expel or marginalise ministers known for their loyalty to Zuma or their incompetence, while bringing in replacements of known ability and integrity. </p>
<p>He has also moved swiftly to address crises at major parastatals, notably at the power utility Eskom and South African Airways to prevent them defaulting on their loans to banks and other creditors. With new boards now in place, emergency measures have been taken to prevent financial meltdown. </p>
<p>Likewise, Ramaphosa has given notice that he is determined to restore the South African Revenue Service to its former glory. Getting rid of the top brass, notwithstanding the resistance of Zuma’s point man, the commissioner Tom Moyane, should not be too difficult. But, as within the parastatals, it is the problem of what to do with Zuma cronies at lower levels of management that is likely to be more difficult and more time consuming. </p>
<p>Zuma cronies who have been embedded in state organisations for a long time will have set up procurement linkages that will need to be examined closely. This will provoke resistance, some of it overt, much of it covert, for whatever the cronyistic patterns of procurement, they will have been celebrated as black empowerment. Their disruption will be stigmatised as reactionary. Pravin Gordhan, the new minister of state owned enterprises, will probably have to get tough, and the fights could get nasty. </p>
<h2>ANC politics</h2>
<p>The other set of challenges which Ramaphosa faces have to do with his party, the ANC. His narrow victory at the party’s national conference was only secured because he did a deal with David Mabuza, then Premier of Mpumalanga, now promoted to <a href="https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/who-is-our-new-deputy-president-elect-david-mabuza-20180226">deputy president</a>. </p>
<p>Ramaphosa will, in time, find that this kind of backing was instrumental. Loyalty will come at a price, and Ramaphosa will have to play his cards carefully. </p>
<p>He may have to make alliances with a lot of party power holders he doesn’t like. This may include ceding control of certain provinces to party barons so that their patronage patterns are left intact. </p>
<p>This is a problem because, as Ramaphosa knows, some provincial governments, such as the Eastern Cape, are grossly inefficient. They are staffed by people who simply lack the capacity to do their jobs – but who have strong connections with local party bosses. Disrupting such networks will take determination and courage, and will meet politically costly pushback. Expect little to be done this side of an election.</p>
<h2>The economy</h2>
<p>Perhaps Ramaphosa’s most formidable challenge is how to kick start economic growth. He has been lauded as the man who, with experience in both the trade union movement and in business, can bring labour and capital together around a new consensus. </p>
<p>It’s a nice idea, and one boosted by Ramaphosa’s smooth talk of convening a summit around the economy. But if it is going to be more than just another talk shop, he is going to have to do an awful lot of arm twisting. Both sides are going to have make concessions. </p>
<p>South Africa’s major corporations have been sitting pretty for years. Despite the horrors of the Zuma years, the stock market has <a href="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/2017/07/31/south-africas-stock-market-defies-recession-scales-record-highs/">boomed</a>. The country became a low investment, high profit economy, characterised by the power of huge <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-economy-is-badly-skewed-to-the-big-guys-how-it-can-be-changed-92365">cartels</a>. </p>
<p>Ramaphosa has to convince them that they have to get out of the comfort zone, warning that if they don’t, levels of inequality and unemployment are such that South Africa may explode. Capitalism is going to hit big trouble if they don’t look beyond the short-term bottom line and commit to serious levels of investment, combining this with major commitments to labour-intensive employment and training. </p>
<p>The president is also going to have the difficult job of convincing the unions that they have a greater responsibility to address unemployment. To date their emphasis has been on securing higher wages for their members (that’s what unions do) and they have succeeded in getting the government to implement a minimum wage. </p>
<p>But these wins have come at a cost. For example, central bargaining has resulted in wage agreements with big firms that have imposed massive costs on small and medium sized businesses. </p>
<p>While no one wants a low wage economy, Ramaphosa would need to convince the unions that something has to give if problems like this are going to be addressed.</p>
<p>Ramaphosa’s easiest task will be to win the next election. But history will judge him on his ability to do something much bigger: rendering the South Africa state one that is not only capable, but genuinely developmental.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93797/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Southall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>South Africa's new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has done well so far but more challenges relating to reigniting the economy lie ahead.Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/928562018-03-25T09:17:47Z2018-03-25T09:17:47ZA Marxist approach appropriate for the climate crisis and the 21st Century<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211176/original/file-20180320-31596-157hdz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Despite the climate crisis, humans have continued emitting and intensively using fossil fuels.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Climate change is the most serious challenge the human species faces. Despite numerous warnings – scientific studies, UN declarations, books, movies, progressive media reporting – global leadership has failed humanity. </p>
<p>But how do humans survive the climate crisis? </p>
<p>The climate crisis should be treated as an emergency, demanding transformative politics that gets to the root causes through democratic systemic reforms. These would include remaking how people produce, consume, finance and organise social life.</p>
<p>A civilisation constantly undermining the conditions that sustain life has to be transformed urgently.</p>
<p>Despite the science and global consensus on the climate crisis, humans have continued emitting and intensively using fossil fuels. As a result the world is recording the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/01/18/2017-was-among-the-planets-hottest-years-on-record-government-scientists-report/?utm_term=.6662195245e1">hottest years</a> on the planet. A heated planet, as a result of human action, unhinges all certainties and places everything in jeopardy. It challenges fixation with growth economics, “catch up” development and every conception of modern progress. </p>
<p>Most fundamentally, it prompts the question, has globalised capitalism lost its progressiveness? Is today’s fossil fuel driven, hi-tech, scientific, financialised and post-Fordist industrial world leading humanity down a path of destruction? </p>
<p>A new book I’ve <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-climate-crisis/">edited</a>, <em>The Climate Crisis- South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives</em>, draws from the analysis, concepts and systemic alternatives emerging at the frontiers of climate justice politics. This includes alternatives championed by global social movements such as <a href="https://viacampesina.org/en/">La Via Campesina</a>, the largest peasant movement in the world, progressive Southern intellectuals and movements within Bolivia, Ecuador and Africa. </p>
<h2>Challenging Marxism to meet the challenge</h2>
<p>As in previous volumes in the <a href="http://copac.org.za/democratic-marxism-book-series/">Democratic Marxism series</a>, this one brings together contributions that are thinking with – and learning from – grassroots movements. Many of the contributors are engaged activist scholars, grassroots activists and movement leaders.</p>
<p>This volume also places Marxism in dialogue with contemporary anti-capitalism in a way that draws on its ideological and movement potentials. Marxism in the 20th century as a ruling ideology, mostly as Marxism-Leninism, has pursued policies that have been ruinous to the environment. These have included championing growth at all costs, monopoly one party state control and catch-up industrialisation with capitalist countries. </p>
<p>In this volume nature is placed at the centre of how Marxism understands capitalism, history and alternatives. It confronts the intersections of climate change, patriarchy and racism inherent to capitalism. Marxism is challenged to think and act democratically in the 21st century. It’s tested as an intellectual resource to serve as the basis for a new future.</p>
<p>This is different from socialisms in the 20th century. These where authoritarian (controlled by elites), anti-nature and undermined the power of workers, peasants and progressive social forces. This volume affirms the renewal of socialism in the 21st century in dialogue with Marxism, ecological thought and democratic alternatives emerging from below. </p>
<h2>A heating planet</h2>
<p>In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen <a href="https://skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction-advanced.htm">drew attention</a> to the heating of the earth’s temperature, otherwise known as climate change. Yet over the past two decades the US refused to adopt the <a href="http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php">Kyoto Protocol</a>. This didn’t go far enough but nevertheless locked in common but differentiated responsibilities for industrial countries to cut emissions. Instead, Washington has worked systematically to scuttle the Kyoto Protocol. </p>
<p>In 2006, Hansen <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/103/39/14288">cautioned</a> that the world has a decade to change the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions or face irreversible changes which would bring disastrous consequences. </p>
<p>Since this plea was made, another decade has been lost including through the ineffectual <a href="http://unfccc.int/paris_agreement/items/9485.php">“Paris Climate Agreement”</a> <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2017/06/01/read-obama-statement-paris-climate-agreement/8jA3iHkFL2E1D55c74BnHJ/story.html">championed</a> by the US President Barack Obama but <a href="http://time.com/4802148/paris-agreement-barack-obama-donald-trump/">undermined</a> by incumbent Donald Trump. Today geologists and climate scientists are talking about a dangerous new world: the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/">Anthropocene</a>. It’s a world in which humans have changed planetary conditions including climate, breaking a 11 700 year pattern of relatively stable climate known as the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth/Holocene">Holocene</a>.</p>
<h2>The realities of climate driven world</h2>
<p>For many the climate crisis is a complex scientific problem. At one level it is. And is very different from daily or seasonal variability in weather. The science of climate change has <a href="https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/">confirmed</a>, with the measurement of greenhouse gases that human induced climate change is happening. </p>
<p>In 2015, the halfway mark towards catastrophic climate change was broken. This was confirmed by the <a href="https://www.wmo.int/pages/index_en.html">World Meteorological Organisation</a> which broadcast to the world that planetary temperatures have reached a 1 degree Celsius <a href="https://e360.yale.edu/digest/2016_hottest_year_on_record_wmo_12_degrees_c">increase</a> higher than the period prior to the industrial revolution.</p>
<p>The world is moving rapidly closer to a <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/31/health/climate-change-two-degrees-studies/index.html">2°C increase</a> in planetary temperature. With this shift, extreme weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, drier conditions enabling fires and floods are becoming more commonplace. Sea levels are also rising, placing many low-lying communities, populous coastal cities and island states in jeopardy. </p>
<p>Climate change on this scale is not expected to unfold in a linear way. Instead, it potentially can happen abruptly or through feedback loops further accelerating runaway climate change. Examples of this include methane release from the Arctic ice sheet, carbon saturation in the oceans and the destruction of rain forests which all feed into the climate change crisis. As the world fails to address the climate crisis, it becomes more complex and more costly.</p>
<p>In response, the <em>Climate Crisis</em> highlights the importance of advancing a deep and just transition that decarbonises society and provides a new basis for organising society to endure climate shocks. </p>
<p>New systems have to be developed through democratic systemic reforms. These would include the rights of nature, degrowth, climate jobs, socially owned renewable energy, a substantive basic income grant, integrated public transport, food sovereignty, solidarity economy and commons approaches to land, water and the cyber sphere.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92856/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vishwas Satgar receives funding from the National Institute of Humanities and Social Science and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is an activist in the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, he chairs the board of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC) and is the editor of the Democratic Marxism book series.</span></em></p>The climate crisis is a complex scientific problem. New systems have to be developed through democratic systemic reforms.Vishwas Satgar, Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/936682018-03-23T08:54:30Z2018-03-23T08:54:30ZConnecting the dots between the hike in South Africa's VAT and inflation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211527/original/file-20180322-165577-1g50bgy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>South Africa is bracing itself for the first <a href="http://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/national%20budget/2018/sars/Budget%202018%20Tax%20Guide.pdf">increase</a> in Value Added Tax (VAT) in many years. The hike is part of the government’s efforts to contain a budget deficit. VAT is set to increase by one percentage point – effectively a 7.14% increase – from 14% to 15% on April 1st.</p>
<p>VAT is an indirect tax that is levied on goods and services traded in an economy. Governments sometimes zero rate basic items to reduce their prices. The <a href="https://www.saica.co.za/integritax/2008/1671_Zero_rating_of_foodstuff.htm">current list</a> in South Africa includes bread, maizemeal and rice. This is done to support the poor and protect them against higher prices.</p>
<p>The VAT increase has been <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/business-report/economy/vat-increase-is-ancs-way-of-making-poor-people-pay-for-their-mistakes-maimane-13623918">criticised</a> in some quarters on the basis that it affects poor people disproportionately. But over and beyond that argument, the biggest challenge is that any increase in indirect taxes affects the price of goods and services. This in turn affects a country’s rate of inflation. </p>
<p>The fallout of the VAT increase is particularly important given that South Africa’s Reserve Bank manages inflation by sticking to <a href="https://journals.co.za/content/journal/10520/EJC-d10537861?crawler=true.../pdf">an inflation target band</a> of 3% to 6%. The Reserve Bank increases interest rates when inflation exceeds – or looks as though it might exceed – 6% over a period of time. The corollary is that it drops rates when inflation stays below the upper level for an extended period of time, or approaches or drops below 3%. </p>
<p>The mechanism has worked well in the recent past. Prior to adopting it, South Africa went through periods of rampant inflation in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, inflation <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/inflation-cpi">peaked around 20%</a> per year in 1986. </p>
<p>Inflation above 10% per annum – as was the case in the <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/inflation-cpi">1970s and 1980s</a> – impoverishes savers and pensioners which is why care should be taken to avoid it happening. Inflation targeting is designed precisely to do this. </p>
<p>There is no doubt that the rise in the VAT rate will affect the rate of inflation. The problem is that the South African Reserve Bank hasn’t made any firm policy statements on the subject. It should have because it has a duty to prepare South Africans for what its next steps will be. With the expected acceleration in inflation due to the increase in VAT, an interest rate increase might indeed be necessary if inflation increases sharply, thus retaining it within the inflation target band.</p>
<h2>The inflation rate with and without the VAT increase</h2>
<p>The rate of inflation over one year to February 2018 (compared to February 2017) <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2018/03/20/south-africa-s-cpi-to-slows-to-4-year-year-in-february">stood at 4%</a>, which is at the lower end of the inflation target range. This is the lowest level recorded since January 2016. Under normal circumstances, an inflation rate at this level would raise the question of whether there was scope for the central bank to ease monetary policy by dropping interest rates.</p>
<p>But these are not normal circumstances given the VAT increase. If the VAT increase of 1 percentage point results in a commensurate increase in the inflation rate, the result will be an inflation rate of 5% – possibly with an increasing trend. At this rate it will be approaching the upper limit of the inflation target, thus raising questions about a possible interest rate hike.</p>
<p>What this means is that decisions about interest rates over the next year will depend on how the VAT increase is treated in the measurement of inflation for monetary policy purposes. The South African Reserve Bank should communicate clearly on the issue in its <a href="https://www.resbank.co.za/MonetaryPolicy/Monetary%20Policy%20Committee/Pages/Dates.aspx">next monetary policy statement</a> next week.</p>
<p>Without clarity, businesses and the general public won’t be in a position to plan for the impact of possible interest rate movements. Clarification is necessary to bring more planning certainty.</p>
<h2>Impact of the VAT increase</h2>
<p>Any assumption about the inflationary pressure of the VAT increase is difficult to estimate. This is because the full impact will be affected by what businesses do.</p>
<p>They have a number of options, all of which will have a different impact on prices.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>They could pass on the full 1 percentage point increase, which would affect prices on all goods except those on the exemption list.</p></li>
<li><p>They could pass on only some of the increase, which would mean that the impact on inflation is less.</p></li>
<li><p>Or they could use the hike in VAT to build in even higher prices increases. This would push inflation up even further.</p></li>
</ul>
<h2>Central bank responses to VAT increases</h2>
<p>Conditions differ between countries and policy responses, but central banks in other countries have looked at the impact of VAT increases on inflation. The available <a href="http://www.iae.csic.es/investigatorsMaterial/a137316014471325.pdf">evidence</a> suggests they’ve factored in higher inflation as a result. </p>
<p>South Africa needs an explanation from its central bank on how it’s going to handle the situation. </p>
<p>In my view the most appropriate approach would be for the central bank to ignore any inflationary impact of the rise in VAT. For one year the inflation target specification of 3% - 6% should exclude the VAT increase to serve the best interests of all South Africans.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93668/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jannie Rossouw is a C2 rated NRF researcher. He previously worked for the SA Reserve Bank. </span></em></p>The South African Reserve Bank needs to guide the market on how it is going to treat VAT increase in its inflation targeting approach.Jannie Rossouw, Head of School of Economic & Business Sciences, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/935642018-03-22T15:27:09Z2018-03-22T15:27:09ZWe've come up with a TB test that's cheaper, quicker and more accurate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211260/original/file-20180320-80634-kize51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease that kills more people due to a bacterial infection than any other disease in the world. </p>
<p>In 2016, the World Health Organisation <a href="http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/">reported</a> over 10 million new infections and 1.7 million deaths. In South Africa, TB remains one of the leading causes of death. </p>
<p>Countries with high TB burdens are tackling the problem in two ways: with the BCG vaccine – the most widely <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749764/">administered vaccine</a> in human history – and a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3162758/">chemotherapeutic regimen</a>. Nevertheless, there are still multiple obstacles to getting the disease under control. </p>
<p>To make major strides, the world needs better interventions, vaccines and ways of diagnosing TB. In addition, new drugs are needed to tackle drug resistant strains and reduce treatment duration. </p>
<p>Extensive effort has been put into improving diagnostics. This makes sense for two reasons: diagnosing people earlier and faster means they get onto treatment earlier, and it reduces the risk of transmission. </p>
<p>There are three ways in which TB is diagnosed: through a sputum smear test; by growing bacteria in a lab through a process known as culturing; and by using molecular diagnostics to detect DNA components of the bacteria.</p>
<p>But each has limitations preventing them from being scaled up. We set about bridging this gap. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/430/eaam6310">our study</a> we’ve identified a way to speed up the age-old sputum smear test by using an invisible ink that lights up when it comes in contact with the TB bacteria. The ink significantly reduces the processing time to get a positive reading on a test. It’s also inexpensive which means our new method paves the way to introducing a test in communities where dozens of diagnostic tests need to be administered each day. </p>
<h2>Limitations to existing tests</h2>
<p>The current range of TB diagnostic tests have various limitations. </p>
<p>For example, the sputum smear is 100 years old. It’s outdated, clumsy and takes long to process. It’s also not very accurate because each sputum sample must contain more than 10 000 bacteria for an accurate test. This means it doesn’t work with patients who have a low number of bacteria. </p>
<p>The challenge is that people with an HIV and TB co-infection have significantly lower levels of bacteria because HIV remodels the way the disease occurs in the lung. </p>
<p>Diagnosing TB in this cohort of people is problematic, particularly in countries like South Africa with the <a href="https://theconversation.com/scientists-are-combining-forces-to-tackle-the-deadly-duo-of-tb-and-hiv-62378">highest HIV and TB co-infection</a> rate in the world.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/211261/original/file-20180320-80637-rzmv82.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A sputum smear after dye has been added and it has been washed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another limitation with smear methods are that they can’t distinguish between living and dead bacteria – making it hard to tell if a person is responding well to treatment. </p>
<p>One of the other methods, culturing, also has serious limitations. For one, it’s a lengthy process. Culturing TB in a laboratory can take up to 42 days because TB is a slow growing organism. This is problematic for treatment and care because it is easy to lose people from the health care system during this time. </p>
<p>Culturing is also difficult in situations where resources are stretched. This means it can’t be scaled up and implemented in a community setting. </p>
<p>Finally, there’s the molecular diagnostics test. One such test is the <a href="https://www.tbfacts.org/xpert-tb-test/">GeneXpert</a> which is being rolled out in South Africa. But its challenge is that it’s expensive and it can’t tell the difference between living and dead organisms. </p>
<h2>Invisible ink</h2>
<p>Our study focused on ways to improve the sputum smear test because it can be scaled up and implemented in communities. </p>
<p>To improve it, we decided to target a specific part of the TB bacteria – its cell wall. This protects the bacteria from the immune system in the body. </p>
<p>TB bacteria are rod shaped. Similarly to a capsule, the bacterial cell wall forms a protective coat that covers the bacteria. It is incredibly complex. It is thick and has many layers and is the reason why TB treatment takes a long time to take effect: drugs need to penetrate the wall. </p>
<p>But the defence wall in fact delivered the solution we’ve pioneered. It is built with mycolic acids, which is made of a chemical molecule (trehalose) unique to the TB bacteria family. As part of our study, the chemical molecule was fused with another chemical (a fluorophore) to create a stain that’s naturally fluorescent and changes colour (known as solvatochromic). The combination is called DMN-trehalose. </p>
<p>The DMN-trehalose is the brainchild of <a href="https://chemistry.stanford.edu/people/carolyn-bertozzi">Dr Carolyn Bertozzi</a> at Stanford University in the US whose lab conceived the idea and generated DMN-trehalose before bringing it to South Africa for tests in clinical samples. </p>
<p>The beauty of DMN-trehalose is that it colourless when it’s outside a TB bacteria. But as soon as it is in the presence of TB-infected sputum, TB bacteria immediately internalise it. Once the DMN-trehalose is inside the bacterial cell, it gets built into the cell wall and lights up the organism. </p>
<p>The advantage of our method is that it promises to reduce the processing time and complexity of the smear test. Another advantage is that it is very specific to TB because trehalose is only found in the TB bacteria family. </p>
<p>Lastly, the DMN-trehalose will only stain living bacteria, meaning it’s possible to tell whether treatment is working or not.</p>
<h2>Next steps</h2>
<p>Now that our study has shown proof of principle, it’s being tested in a pilot study at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. </p>
<p>The pilot will take one year and will look at both the sputum smears and oral swabs to assess how well DMN-trehalose works. It will assess sputum samples from people before treatment to establish if accurate diagnosis is possible, and after completing treatment to see if the regimes worked. </p>
<p>The pilot will help us compare it to the current staining method in sputum smear tests. If it produces similar results, the new test could become the preferred method because it requires less processing. </p>
<p>Effective, cheap and scalable diagnostics are urgently required for TB. For this, the new DMN-trehalose stain has great promise. It’s also an excellent research tool to help understand TB transmission and how TB bacteria remodels their cell walls during TB disease.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93564/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bavesh Kana receives/received funding from the South African National Research Foundation, South African Medical Research Council, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the US National Institutes of Health. </span></em></p>The current range of TB diagnostic tests have various limitations like the sputum smear which is outdated, clumsy and takes long to process.Bavesh Kana, Head of the Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.